


Number One Enemy

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: Number One Enemy [2]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-10
Updated: 2011-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:49:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3211454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One moment Lorraine was there, and the next she wasn't. An AU take on S3, focussing on background characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

            The thing about going through anomalies was that you knew you ran the risk of the world changing while you weren’t there. Key examples of this included Professor Cutter and the Claudia Brown he kept talking about.

 

            But no matter how well you knew this academically, you were still liable to forget that it was possible. It just seemed so unlikely.

 

            You just didn’t expect it to be _personal_.

 

***

 

            The trip through the anomaly was normal enough. The missing teenager was found boggling at a herd of aurochs, sternly reprimanded, and hauled back through the anomaly; no injuries were sustained, no-one died, and Cutter kept his temper. Everything seemed fine: Finn was hiding a hangover from Captain Becker’s gimlet eye, Pink was sulking because Wales had lost to the Springboks, again, and Blade was in no worse a temper than usual. In fact, he was practically pleasant, something Connor Temple remarked on.

 

            Finn, packing away weapons into the back of one of the jeeps, did a double-take. “What d’you mean?”

 

            “Well, he’s normally...” Connor waved his hands illustratively. “I mean. All stern, and with roughly as much expression as a rock, and a pissed-off rock, too. But now he looks like he might actually _smile_ every now and then.”

 

            “Lorraine’s mellowed him,” Finn grinned.

 

            Connor said, “Who’s Lorraine?”

 

            His voice was drowned out by the sound of Finn slamming the boot of the car shut.

 

***

 

             Whitehall was used to power-mongers in smart suits cruising through its corridors like sharks - and two of the biggest were in town today. People kept their heads down or their eyes fixed on the middle distance when Christine Johnson and James Lester passed, and it was a toss-up as to which was more feared, although it was generally believed that Christine would just have you thrown into a dungeon for the rest of your life, while Lester would follow you down there and make rude remarks about you at strategic intervals until you were a whimpering wreck on the floor.

 

            So it was something of a shock to see Lester keeping to Christine’s pace, and following her rules – that was why so many people took care not to see it. But ‘so many people’ didn’t include the young woman dressed in a grey blouse that didn’t suit her, a black pencil skirt and low heels, who came out of a small corridor leading onto a larger one, caught the eye of the man in grey camouflage who waited there, and halted abruptly, watching Christine and Lester march briskly along. Christine was on fine form today, steamrollering every conversational gambit Lester made, and it looked as if she was going to walk past the man in those unorthodox combats, except that both he and the woman in the grey blouse knew that she never missed a thing.

 

            “-I need a _detailed_ briefing on-” Christine Johnson met the man’s eye, and stopped abruptly, then swivelled sharply with a smile for Lester. “James, I’m going to have to reschedule. Let’s have dinner.”

 

            Lester gaped, as much as a man in his position ever did, his pale blue eyes flickering from Johnson to the man in combats, and Christine laid a firm hand on his shoulder, glanced round, and found the woman in the blouse. “Lo _rraine_ ,” she said warmly, and the woman stepped forward. “Would you escort Mr Lester from the building?”

 

            The woman, Lorraine, cast her eyes down and murmured something suitable, and Christine moved on, heading straight for the man in combats like a crocodile for its prey. Lester didn’t see any more, because Lorraine was chasing him inexorably towards the exit. He tried to catch her eye once, and got a glimpse of chocolate skin, a straight, wide-tipped nose, firm chin and neutral dark eyes, but mostly she kept her eyes lowered, away from Lester and hidden by a short curtain of black hair, ferociously straightened and cut into a bob. She seemed oddly quiet to be working for Christine, who generally preferred her subordinates just noisy enough to be obsequious.

 

            “I don’t think we’ve met,” he said, once Lorraine had bypassed the security guards with an unfamiliar-looking pass, and escorted him onto the steps. “Are you a recent addition to the Home Office?”

 

            Lorraine’s head lifted, and she met Lester’s eye calmly, eyebrows quirking slightly, but with no other sign of emotion on her face.

 

            He raised his own eyebrows. “I’m sorry you don’t feel yourself able to answer a simple question. Good day, Lorraine. I hope that, next time we meet, the cat will have let go of your tongue.”

 

            He turned and went. He did not look back to see Lorraine go back inside the building, smile and nod to the guards, and make for the canteen; he went round the corner, found his driver, and returned himself to the ARC. There was paperwork to be done, after all, and the motley crew to rein in; all the boring necessities of running a facility like the ARC. With any luck, Claire would have put the appropriate documents on his desk, although he wouldn’t lay money on it, as he hadn’t told her what they were.

 

            Unfortunately, his day was only getting worse. Arriving back at the ARC, he found the place in a state of some confusion, and this time it wasn’t just because Abby Maitland had brought her blasted flying lizard to work and allowed it to wreak havoc. A knot of people had gathered in the atrium to one side of the new and improved anomaly detector, attracting no little attention from the technicians working on it. Lester’s secretary Claire was looking distressed and apologising repeatedly, Jenny was looking harassed, Captain Becker was looking puzzled, and Connor Temple was looking pre-emptively guilty - and at the centre of it all were three soldiers, in varying degrees of agitation. Lester wouldn’t go so far as to say he recognised them – at least one was a complete mystery to him – but, generally speaking, they were fairly unmistakable and hard not to take note of, one because he was tall, good-looking and mildly psychopathic, and the other for the fact that (while a decent person and a competent soldier) he had moments of occasional incredible stupidity which resulted in his being named in quite a few of the reports that crossed Lester’s desk.

 

            “I’m sure this is easily resolved,” Jenny was saying, with a confidence he could tell she didn’t feel. “When Mr Lester returns-”

 

            “Are you taking my name in vain, Jenny?” he drawled, strolling up to the group, and adding thoughtfully: “Again?” He looked around at them, and widened his eyes. “I presume you all have jobs to do. In fact, I know you do, because I pay you for them. Why aren’t you doing them?”

 

            Jenny started to say something, but Connor Temple, looking even more like an excitable Labrador puppy than normal, leapt in. “Pink, Finn and Blade-“ he gestured at the men- “they went through the anomaly this morning - and by the way, it’s all right, we managed to put the sabretooth kitten back before its mum noticed it was gone and there was some idiot gone through but we brought him back - and they say the timeline’s changed. They say someone’s missing.”

 

            Lester allowed himself a breath in which to be surprised. He blinked, raised his eyebrows, and observed: “Well, it’s always good to know that Professor Cutter’s delusions are infectious.”

 

            “It’s not Claudia Brown this time,” Jenny almost snapped. “Someone different. A Miss Wickes. Your secretary and my friend, apparently, although I can’t say I’ve ever known anyone of her description or seen anyone similar around here.”

 

            “My secretary’s name is Claire,” Lester said, and turned his gaze on the three men. The dim-looking one – Finn, he thought – and the one he didn’t recognise, presumably the unfortunate Pink, immediately developed official blank stares, but the third didn’t. He met Lester’s eyes straight on, and Lester would be lying if he said he found nothing to be afraid of in that look. “I have had no other secretary since the beginning of this misbegotten excuse for a government project, and I’d think that if I had, I’d know about it. You must be mistaken.”

 

            The third, Blade, did not falter. “We aren’t... sir,” he said, with a tiny, deliberate pause applied to good effect, and took a picture, creased from much folding, out of a pocket of his tac vest and handed it over. Lester, much against his will, his better judgement, and his sense of the ridiculous, was interested.

 

            He took the small piece of photographic paper and unfolded it until he was looking at a photograph of a young woman sitting in a wicker chair with her feet tucked up and a book open in her lap. Despite a difference of hairstyle, reading glasses perched on the end of the young woman’s nose, and different clothes, the young woman was recognisably the Lorraine Christine Johnson had called on to take him out of the building, and who had refused to speak to him. An uncomfortable shudder going up his spine, he did his best to make his face impassive, and handed the photograph back to its owner. “Let me guess; her Christian name is Lorraine.”

 

            Blade relaxed almost imperceptibly. “She’s a humanist, sir, but yes. Lorraine Wickes.”

 

            “I don’t see what this has to do with anything, James,” Jenny said impatiently. She looked like a cat on hot bricks; unsurprising, given Professor Cutter’s unfortunate Claudia Brown fixations. This would just be lending fuel to the wildfire raging around her identity. “Either way, Lorraine Wickes isn’t here, and never has been.”

 

            “Oh, I do,” Lester said. “Would it interest you to know that Christine Johnson has an aide called Lorraine who appears to be a pair of glasses and a haircut short of that picture?”

 

            Jenny went still. “Christine Johnson? You mentioned her. Like a velociraptor, only better dressed?”

 

            “Yes. Ex-MI6, and apparently the new military liaison to the ARC...” Lester saw Becker twitch - “a piece of information hitherto unknown to me, and, I see, to Captain Becker. Very interesting. What occurs to me is that it is very odd that Lorraine Wickes should turn up as a colleague of Christine’s on the same day that three soldiers come back through an anomaly swearing on their mothers’ graves that she ought to be working for _me_. Corporal Richards.” Having remembered Blade’s proper name, he turned suddenly to address him. “You seem remarkably persistent in defence of the unknown Miss Wickes. Passing over your reasons for keeping a picture of her in your pocket, please be so good as to inform us where the Miss Wickes you knew fits into this... ménage?”

 

            Blade stiffened slightly, but kept his countenance. “Lorraine had been working at the ARC since early 2007, I think, or late 2006. She was head-hunted from MI5, where she used to work for Ian Mackie, the ARC liaison. She never told me any more, sir. She’d no reason to. The fact that she used to work for MI5 isn’t common knowledge, either.”

 

            “No,” Lester said thoughtfully. “Going on my few minutes’ knowledge of the woman in question, it wouldn’t be. How... interesting. A call to Mackie should clear up whether or not he knows her, or knows _of_ her. Describe her to me, in terms of personality. I have a feeling this isn’t the last I’ll be hearing of Lorraine Wickes.”

 

             Blade took a breath, and Lester saw Pink and Finn glance at each other, Pink tucking a smirk into the corner of his mouth. “She’s _very_ clever, sir. Good at organising people, level-headed, quite good with computers. She likes clearly-cut rules. She’s quiet, doesn’t believe in herself half the time, doesn’t make friends easily, and doesn’t like dealing with people outside the work environment. She’s loyal. She’ll sell her integrity dearly.” He almost hesitated, and then said: “She was in the building during the incident with the future predators, and I’m pretty sure she has PTSD. She’s also a crack shot. But both of those things happened in... before we went through the anomaly, in our timeline, so it’s probably not the same here.”

 

            Lester sniffed. “You seem to know a lot about a secretary, Corporal.”  


            Finn jumped in, with a look at Blade that suggested he expected the man to pull out a knife and disembowel Lester there and then. “Miss Wickes knows everyone, sir. She took over some of Leek’s duties after he died, with Miss Lewis. She could run the place if she wanted to, sir.”

 

           “You were close to her?” Lester enquired of Blade, ignoring Finn.

 

           Blade met his eyes squarely. “Yes, sir.”

 

          “Hmm,” Lester said, as if the question had been nothing more than a matter of form in the first place. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Finn and Pink made identical grabs for Blade’s wrists which Lester didn’t see, because he had turned away and was walking up the ramp.

 

          “Lorraine will- would make you sleep on the sofa if you killed him,” Finn muttered, and then seemingly realised that Blade wasn’t trying to go for a knife and let go. So did Pink, a little more slowly.

 

           “I know,” Blade said quietly, and casually eased something under the sleeve of his shirt with one hand – Jenny could see a flat outline there, and suspected he was moving one of his wrist knives. It might have been coincidence that his hand brushed against the pocket of his tac vest into which the picture had vanished, but probably wasn’t.  
 

           Jenny cleared her throat. “Mysterious disappearing secretaries aside, you’d better go and resume your duties. The rest of you have work to do, too. Claire, stop looking worried, none of this is your fault. Connor, stop looking like Star Wars has come to life in front of you and go and apologise to Norman for breaking the fusebox yesterday. Captain Becker, I’m sure you need to go and put cameras on walls, or whatever it is today.”

 

          She watched Blade, Pink and Finn make their escape, waited to see everyone else disperse, and then went up to her own office. She hoped that Blade didn’t try to go after this woman Lorraine, even though they had clearly been very close. Jenny would happily have bet her entire salary on Lorraine’s being his girlfriend, although she suspected Lester hadn’t quite grasped that aspect of the problem. Apart from anything else, he would undoubtedly terrify her.

 

***

 

         “You’re going to find her, aren’t you?” Finn said, with a certain amount of resignation.

 

         Blade said nothing.

 

         “That’s a yes,” Finn predicted gloomily. “Well, try not to scare her shitless, yeah?”

 

         “What?” Pink demanded, not quite with the flow of the conversation and consequently belligerent. “What _now_?”

 

         “None of your business,” Finn said.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks go to fififolle and kerry_louise for cheerleading, canadian_jay for not gloating as much as she could have done, and lukadreaming for betaing the Whole Thing, removing about seventy zillion commas along the way. Blade, Finn and Lyle belongs to fredbassett, Matt belongs to telperion_15, and bigtitch rescued Ross from the clutches of BBC Wales.

 

 

Lorraine Wickes found who she was looking for without even having to try very hard. He was sitting in a corner of the canteen, with a polystyrene cup of slowly-cooling coffee in front of him, his beret resting on the table to one side of him and his head in his hands. She bought two more cups of coffee, and went over to join him, pushing a fresh cup of coffee under his nose. “Drink it. Yours must be cold by now.”

 

The man in the grey combats looked up, gave an acknowledging grunt, and took a long draught of the coffee without appearing to notice that it was both foully bitter and boiling hot. Lorraine sipped at her own more circumspectly, and waited until he had recovered his composure and put his beret back on again.

 

“I suppose it went roughly as well as expected?” she said.

 

He cast his eyes heavenwards. “My men are my responsibility, and she needs the artefact.”

 

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Lorraine said with genuine compassion.

 

“I know,” Captain Ross said, and emptied the last of his coffee down his throat. “That’s better.”

 

Lorraine nodded, and fiddled with the plastic lid of her cup, levering it off and watching the steam rise. “The paperwork is on your desk. Condolences to Lieutenant Richold’s parents, Private Hogan’s brother, and Sergeant Martin’s wife and children. All you need to do is check I haven’t made any mistakes and sign the letters, then get them back to me and I can have them posted by this afternoon, with the families by tomorrow morning. And pension forms for the sergeant’s family, which should be self-explanatory, if they’re not, give me a ring and I can help you with them. I’ve got Sergeant Yates overseeing the cleaning-out of the men’s kit.”

 

“You’re a lifesaver,” Captain Ross said with conviction.

 

Lorraine raised one eyebrow. “I’m paid to be. Have you had that cut seen to properly, or is that a field dressing?” She gestured at the cut on the side of his face, taped together with white butterfly plasters.

 

“Seen to properly,” Captain Ross said. “And if you don’t believe me, you can ask Dr Sharma.”

 

Lorraine smiled. “Would I do a thing like that?”

 

“Yes,” Captain Ross told her, with the absolute certainty of a man whose last leave was coerced out of him by a cunning combination of the resident doctor’s browbeating and Lorraine’s quietly sorting out the forms and sweet-talking Christine into counter-signing them behind his back.

 

Lorraine chuckled softly. “Maybe I would. I have a serious question.”

 

Captain Ross raised his eyebrows at her. “Go on.”

 

Lorraine looked down at her coffee cup, sipped carefully at it, and then laid it down and looked Ross in the eye. “What do you know about the security team assigned to Sir James Lester’s project?”

 

Rather than coming down again, Captain Ross’ eyebrows attempted to mate with his hairline.     

 

“You don’t know James Lester by sight,” Lorraine answered the unspoken question. “I do. Christine had me walk him out of the building today, and she wants me to make dinner reservations for two at her club, guest James Lester, to be admitted when he arrives, not when she does. Something’s going on. I repeat: what do you know about the security team assigned to his project?”

 

He stalled for time. “Is this a formal or an informal query?”

 

“Informal,” Lorraine said. “Gossip between colleagues.” She hesitated, and then obeyed her instincts. “Nothing in writing. I have this interesting idea that I might be messing them around on Christine’s orders shortly, and I need to know what I might be dealing with.”

 

Captain Ross thought for a moment. “They’re a close-knit lot,” he said slowly. “And they’re most of them Regiment, and experienced. Used to be under Major Ryan’s command, before he was promoted - he’s a good man. Now they’ve got Captain Becker. Newly promoted, sharp, a good soldier, but they’re likely to think of him as green, and all the gen I’ve been hearing makes me think they resent the replacement, think Lieutenant Lyle should have been promoted and given the spot. There’s justice in that, even if it’s not Becker’s fault. Lyle’s flippant, but a lot steadier than he looks, and cold as ice when he needs to be – and he’s a lot more familiar with the... specialised nature of the project. They had another team working there, but I hear they’ve been taken out to Afghanistan and temporarily replaced by hired guns. The soldiers don’t like them or trust them.”

 

“I know about that,” Lorraine said, and he gave her a sharp glance. She knew he was probably wondering whether she’d done it for Christine, to weaken the ARC’s security, but said nothing. Christine had felt that sufficiently important to handle it herself. “Thanks. There are fault lines there I can work with. Is there anyone else I should be worrying about?”

 

Captain Ross rubbed his thumb across his lower lip and thought. “No... yes. There’s one everyone knows about. He’s ex-Royal Engineers, often gets the close-protection jobs, and he’s lethal with knives – and he’s always carrying at least one. There’s a story there. Couldn’t tell you what it is. But steer clear of him, Miss Wickes. Or take him out first.”

 

Lorraine’s eyebrows shot up. “Thank you, Captain. What’s his name?”

 

Captain Ross shook his head. “He just goes by a nickname. Blade.”

 

“What does he look like?”

 

“I don’t know, miss, I’ve never met him. Only heard of him.”

 

Lorraine looked politely sceptical. “What _do_ you take me for, Captain? How did your informant, or informants, describe him?”

 

Captain Ross’ eyes flickered, in acknowledgement of a hit. “Not much. But the general agreement seems to be that he’s inhuman. He doesn’t look human; he doesn’t act human. He’s robotic. Clinical.”

 

“Hnn.” Absorbing this information, Lorraine bit her tongue, and blasphemed.

 

“Did you hurt yourself, miss?” Captain Ross asked quickly, and reached out to touch her jaw delicately with blunt fingers.

 

Lorraine went still. “What are you doing?” she enquired, soft and level.

 

“Giving the ginger girl with the big blue eyes something to look at,” he said, equally softly. “Don’t look round. She’s directly behind you and four tables back.”

 

“Alicia _Hollonby_ ,” Lorraine said through gritted teeth.

 

He grinned at her, and let his hand drop. “You look fierce, Miss Wickes. Smile.”

 

Reluctantly, she did so. “I’m an appalling actress.”

 

He shrugged. “So am I. We’ll pass muster.”

 

“I’m glad to hear you think so,” Lorraine said dryly.

 

Captain Ross just smiled, and asked her out for a drink in tones loud enough to be heard by the entire room, if they were paying attention. Lorraine glowered at him, and sincerely hoped they weren’t. “I’ll think about it,” she promised, equally loudly. “Now go away and finish your paperwork, Captain.”

 

“My name’s Adam,” he told her, and went away, doing a fair impression of someone cocky enough to believe that he had a chance with her.

 

Lorraine took several deep breaths, forced immobility on her countenance, and finished her coffee.

 

***

 

After a medical screening, and after exhaustive questioning which established that Lorraine’s change of career was probably the only thing that had changed while they were on the other side of the anomaly, Blade, Pink and Finn were allowed to go home. They made their way out of the ARC, dressed in civilian clothes kept in their lockers for changing into after work if the occasion called for it, and parted company at the train station: Pink shared a flat with a cousin of his which was at the end of a direct train line, while Blade and Finn found themselves taking three short journeys by Tube and bus just to get back to their house.

 

“Where are you going to start?” Finn asked, as they walked towards the bus stop. Blade didn’t have to ask what he meant.

 

“With her flat, in Putney. I’ll go and have a look, see if the place is still there, and if it is, I’ll call the landline number and see what I get on the answering machine.”

 

“You know Matt’ll be suspicious if you don’t get back at the same time as me,” Finn pointed out. “And it isn’t half a trek from here to Putney to Hammersmith.”

 

Blade grinned at him. “Not if you tell him I’m doing the shopping.”

 

Finn grinned back. “You’ve been thinking, mate. I’ll do that. See you later.” He jumped onto a bus, slapped his Oystercard against the reader and found a space to strap-hang. Blade watched him go, and crossed the street to the bus stop on the other side, where he caught another, entirely different, bus.

 

Nothing had changed, as far as he could tell. He passed the same buildings, caught the second bus, and got off at the bus stop in Lime Gardens, a few minutes’ walk from the ancient Victorian building that housed the landlady, Lorraine, a pleasant-faced newspaper journalist who lived in the basement, and a chronically nervous man called Mikey who worked in media and referred to Blade – sometimes to his face – as a psycho. Or at least, it had done, before he had stepped through an anomaly that morning.

 

He went around the corner, skirted the edges of the familiar garden enclosed in black railings, and came to Lorraine’s door almost on automatic. There were a few places he could put himself if he needed to watch the house closely; benches in the enclosed garden, and very thick shrubbery. The gate was locked, of course, but not on a permanent basis, and anyway the lock was feeble enough to act as little more than a deterrent.

 

Making a note of all these things, Blade stopped and halted at the big black front door and then took out his mobile and looked at it, as if checking an address. He could see that there were lights in the windows on one side of the house, the side which – if his memories held true – was still used by the landlady. On the other side, they were dark, despite the increasing gloom of the early evening; he zipped up his jacket, and peered at the little row of bells to one side of the door. He found what he was looking for under C: the small piece of card, behind its plastic, read _L. WICKES_ in unmistakable clear handwriting. It felt like his stomach jolted and his heart jumped with the confirmation that Lorraine was real and alive and maybe not so changed after all, and he fought to keep his face blank to anyone passing by, even though Lorraine herself would have smiled and carefully not made a comment about seeing him happy. Well – the Lorraine as he knew her would have done, and he did know her.

 

He heard someone’s footsteps behind him, and turned to jog down the steps, cursing mentally when he saw that it was none other than Lorraine’s downstairs neighbour Mikey, who apart from calling him a psycho took what Blade considered to be a prurient interest in Lorraine’s life, and would undoubtedly mention this to her when next he saw her.

 

“’Scuse me,” Mikey said, bustling past Blade with a plastic shopping bag and a puzzled expression. “Are you looking for someone?” he asked, letting himself in.

 

“Yes,” Blade said, succumbing to a sudden idea. “Nobody called Jacinth lives here, do they?”

 

Mikey frowned. “No,” he said. “Not unless you know something about my landlady I don’t. If she sent you to 21 Lime Gardens Square, try next door. This is The Rectory, Lime Garden Square, which so happens to be between number 20 and number 21. I know, it makes no sense. Or she might have meant Lime Gardens Road, which is just out there. Sorry I couldn’t help you.”

 

Blade shrugged. “Thanks anyway. I’ll ring her.” He brought his mobile up again, and started scrolling through the contacts. Mikey went in and shut the door behind him, and Blade waited a decent interval before strolling away around the other side of the square with his phone to his ear, waiting for it to stop ringing and hit the answering machine. Mikey might be at home, but it was only half-past five, and given her natural workaholism it was likely that Lorraine was only just beginning to think of leaving the office.

 

He hadn’t done badly. Lorraine was definitely living there, that much was for certain. It felt very good to be certain that she was alive and well, with the evidence of what Lester – disdainful bastard though he was – had seen, and the name-tape by the bell. It might well be easier to look her up than he’d feared, even if it was just to see if she was okay; he’d been hearing bad things about Christine Johnson. She might even look _him_ up, if her relationship with Mikey was what it had been. If it was, Blade was absolutely certain that Mikey would mention the stranger looking for someone to her, and with luck, she would trace him. Or at least keep a look-out for him.

 

Particularly as he happened to have given her sister’s name as that of the woman he was looking for.

 

Blade allowed himself a grin and listened to the answering machine message that had just kicked in.

 

“You’ve reached Lorraine Wickes. I’m sorry I can’t get to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and your number, I’ll call you back.”

 

Yes. Definitely there. Blade set his jaw and ended the call, knowing that that was the end of the message, and resisted the temptation to call her back. He wanted to hear her voice again so badly, even if she wasn’t talking to him. He’d been away from her before, sometimes for quite a long time, but he’d always known that she’d be there when he came back, and now she wasn’t; now she didn’t even know who he was. It made bits of him he wasn’t entirely familiar with hurt, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He felt a sudden, unexpected sympathy for Cutter. If this was what losing Claudia Brown had been like (although he took leave to doubt it), no wonder the bugger kept going on about it.

 

Blade spotted a Sainsbury’s, conveniently close to the familiar route back to his own home. Well. He might as well fulfil his cover story while he was here.


	3. Chapter 3

“Lorraine.”

 

Lorraine looked up to the unpleasant sight of her employer looming over her, looking agreeable and ruthless. “Miss Johnson?”

 

“Have you booked the Civil Service Club?”

 

“Yes,” Lorraine said, and added, in the interests of accuracy, “with your special instructions in place.”

 

“Excellent. I knew there was a reason I hired you, and it has to be said, Lorraine, that your taste in clothing isn’t it.”

 

Lorraine refrained from mentioning Christine’s beehive hair, which invariably made her look starched, bad-tempered and ten years older, and looked down at her desk with a suitably abashed mumble.

 

Christine gave a thin, benevolent smile. “I need you to do something for me. I want the schematics of that squalid building Lester’s packed his crew into, and I want the payroll. I want to know who works there, down to the very last cleaner.”

 

            Lorraine made a note. “When do you need the information by?”

 

            “Thursday will do nicely,” Christine said. “Thursday morning, that is. And one of the lights in my office is broken. I want it fixed by the time I get into work tomorrow.”

 

            “I’ll have Maintenance come round immediately, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said calmly, peering at her calendar and cursing in the privacy of her own head. It was Tuesday.

 

            “See that you do,” Christine said, and went back to her office, to Lorraine’s profound gratitude.

 

            Lorraine removed her reading glasses, rubbed her eyes and took her contacts book out of her handbag, putting the glasses back on to read it. There were people who might be able to help... She flicked over a page, stopped on one name, nodded to herself, and reached for the telephone and dialled the number. Luckily, the man on the other end picked up the phone immediately. “Edward? It’s Lorraine Wickes. I’ve got a bit of a problem here and I wonder if you could help me...”

 

            Captain Ross chose this inopportune moment to walk in. Lorraine made a variety of interesting gestures that roughly translated to _sit down, I’m on the telephone_. Captain Ross sat down and waited.

 

            “... Yes. Yes, I realise it’s a classified building, Edward, I work for a very similar organisation... _Yes_ , I can get written permission from my superior, although I _do_ have the security clearance myself... I went up a grade when I took this new job... Thank you. Christine Johnson. No, I didn’t think you’d want me to bother her... That’s very helpful of you, Edward, I can be with you in half an hour. Thanks so much. See you then.” Lorraine put the phone down with a small, satisfied smile. “It’s amazing how many doors a name can open,” she told Captain Ross, putting her contacts book back in her handbag.

 

            Captain Ross nodded. “First you need to know what doors need opening, though.”

 

            Lorraine gave him a careful look, but let it slide. “What’s the matter? It’ll need to be quick. I’m in a hurry.”

 

            “I brought the letters and the forms,” he said, displaying them.

 

            “Good,” Lorraine said, getting up. “The forms will keep until tomorrow. If you’d be so good as to stamp and address the letters – stamps, there, envelopes, there, biro, addresses – I can take them with me when I go and post them on the way out. I’ll be one moment.”

 

            She popped out and went to the ladies’ loos down the corridor, used them, returned and shrugged on the black trench coat hanging on the back of her door, locked away the more sensitive documents and gathered her things into her handbag, by which time Captain Ross had finished with the letters, despite being incapable of writing faster than an arthritic tortoise. “Thanks. I’d better go and tell Christine I’m off now. See you tomorrow.”

 

            “See you then,” Captain Ross agreed, standing up. “Miss Wickes, that drink I mentioned-”

 

            “Like I said,” Lorraine interrupted gently, “I’ll think about it. Adam.” She smiled, and went out and just along the corridor to Christine’s office.

 

            “Yes?” Christine snapped before she’d even knocked. Lorraine would have been impressed by that, except that she knew about the fisheye camera installed above Christine’s door. She’d found the contractor to install it.

 

            She opened the door. “I’m just off, Miss Johnson. Edward Remington can get me copies of the plans you requested, but I need to go in person and he wants to see me now. See you tomorrow, ma’am.”

 

            “Yes, all right,” Christine said irritably. Lorraine strongly suspected that she hadn’t paid attention to a word she’d said, but she didn’t particularly care; she was just glad to get away untouched.

 

            She hurried down to the car park and got into her car, flicking on her headlights and driving away with a mild sense of satisfaction. It would be a lie to say that she liked Christine Johnson; the woman was dangerous, unpredictable, rude, greedy and wasteful of human life. And Captain Ross had just presented her with the kind of conundrum that needed to be thought over carefully, preferably in the presence of a large pot of tea. But then there was the satisfaction of knowing she was managing the day-to-day running of the project without hiccups and doing the impossible tasks Christine gave her better than anyone else could. There was also something gratifying about working for someone whose name made it so easy to get difficult things done, a kind of vicarious power Lorraine suspected was unhealthy. The pay was more than satisfactory, too, and she was getting experience that would look very good on her CV when she came to move on, in a year or so. Lorraine had had her fill of MI6 for the moment, and thought Torchwood were a little too blasé for her taste, but a secondment to the Ministry of Defence or the Foreign Office wasn’t out of the question, and UNIT looked very promising.  

 

            Lorraine smiled. It would be an exaggeration to say she loved her job, but she was content, and there were bigger and better things on the horizon.

 

***

           

            It was seven o’clock before Lorraine got home, parking her car neatly under a lamp-post and trotting up the steps to the front door, tired but still pleased with herself. Edward Remington, full of the fear of Christine Johnson, had come up trumps far more quickly than she’d expected him to and had been very pleasant about it. Clearly terrified, but pleasant.

 

            She let herself in and went upstairs, intending to run herself a bath, make that pot of tea and settle down to a good solid think about Captain Ross, but was badly startled by her downstairs neighbour’s door, which banged open and almost hit her face.

 

            “Lorraine!” Mikey exclaimed, popping out like a jack-in-the-box and giving her a hell of a shock. “ _There_ you are! The most _bizarre_ thing happened today. Come in and I’ll tell you all about it.”

           

            Lorraine repressed a sigh. “How bizarre? It’s been a long day.”

 

            “Oh, sweetie,” Mikey said sympathetically. “You look knackered. Demon boss from hell giving you a bad time?”

 

            “She is _not_ the demon boss from hell,” Lorraine said weakly. “Not really.”

 

            Mikey raised an eyebrow at her. “Oh yes? Come in and have a cup of tea.”

 

            Lorraine resigned herself to her fate and followed him in, hanging up her trenchcoat and leaving her handbag at the foot of the coat pegs. “What is it that’s got you so excited, Mikey?”                  

            “Gorgeous, mysterious strangers on the doorstep,” Mikey said triumphantly, putting the kettle on.

 

            “It was probably the window-cleaner,” Lorraine told him.

 

            Mikey wasn’t in the slightest deflated. “Oh, _definitely_ not,” he said, throwing a lascivious grin over his shoulder as he got down two mugs and a box of teabags. “I never met a window-cleaner who looked like _that_. No, he was looking for someone.”

 

            “Really?” Lorraine asked, as the kettle began to boil. “Who?”

 

            “Someone called Jacinth,” Mikey said, and Lorraine was suddenly very interested indeed. “He didn’t find her. Something wrong?”

 

            “Nothing,” Lorraine lied. “Spill the beans. What did he look like?”

 

            “ _Very_ nice,” Mikey said. “Tall, broad-shouldered, but not bulky, you know what I mean? Strong enough to sweep a girl off her feet-” he winked at Lorraine, and she laughed at him - “but not the Incredible Hulk, not over-muscled. Tanned, just lightly. Well-dressed, but not in a fashionable way. He was just wearing things that suited him. Decently cut dark jeans, a grey winter coat. He had it zipped up, but I _think_ he was wearing a rugby shirt underneath. Big, capable hands. And whoever picked out those jeans for him had a good eye. I got an _extremely_ good look at his arse, and it was a sight for sore eyes, let me tell you. Wish he’d dropped his phone and bent over to pick it up, or something...”

 

            “Mikey!” Lorraine yelped, and laughed at him.

 

            “You would have been looking too.” Mikey grinned unrepentantly, and handed over her mug of tea.

 

            She blew on it to cool it and shook her head at him. “You weren’t looking, you were staring. I only hope you didn’t frighten him to death. Did you take your eyes off his bottom long enough to look at his face?”

 

            “It was a struggle,” Mikey agreed. “But yes. Nothing to complain about there, either. Clean-cut, five o’clock shadow, wide mouth, close-cropped black hair, and the brightest green eyes you _ever_ did see – and the colour must be real, he didn’t look like the sort to wear coloured contacts, which is just cheating if you ask me.”

 

            “He sounds improbable,” Lorraine said, drinking her tea. “And you must have been taking notes. You took all this in at a glance?”  


            Mikey shook his head. “No, I spoke to him. _Then_ I went upstairs and made notes,” he quipped, and Lorraine smiled. “I liked the look of him.”

 

            “I couldn’t tell,” Lorraine murmured.

 

            Mikey reached over and smacked her shoulder lightly. “Cheek! When he spoke, he was very... very to-the-point, very concise. He was quite stern, I thought. A sort of dangerous type – almost a bad boy, but a bit too quiet and unshowy to fit that traditional stereotype. Enough to make your average bad-boy type run away screaming for their mummies,” Mikey pronounced with satisfaction. “In need of taming, but worth the trouble!”

 

            “Glad to hear it,” Lorraine said dryly, mind racing. Mikey had described an extremely good-looking man, yes, but also a very physically fit one, and – if Mikey’s judgement was right, and it was generally close enough – a ‘dangerous’ one. Mikey hadn’t been afraid of him, though, which was a point in his favour, and the fact that he’d been asking after someone called Jacinth could just be a coincidence, uncommon name though it was. He’d given Mikey no personal details, or Mikey would have told Lorraine, and it probably wasn’t worth the bother of taking steps to find out who he was, if that was even possible. Still, Lorraine would keep an eye out for him. “When was this?”

 

            “Oh, earlier.” Mikey shrugged. “About half five?”

 

            “Hm,” Lorraine said. “Well, I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t looking for me.” She took a gulp of her tea and smiled at Mikey. “Who knows, maybe he’ll come back looking for _you_.”

 

            Mikey snorted. “I doubt it, sweetheart.”

 

            “You’re your own worst critic,” Lorraine informed him, and finished the tea, putting the mug gently down on the coffee table. “I’d better be going. I’m shattered. Thanks for the tea and the gossip, Mikey.”

 

            “Any time,” Mikey assured her, opening the door. “Have a good evening. Are you still on for brunch on Saturday?”

 

            “Yes, provided you can prise yourself out of bed before noon,” Lorraine teased, picking up her coat and handbag. “I have gossip to share with you then. Well, I think I will. I still need to work out what I think about him.”

 

            Mikey uttered a steam-whistle shriek. “You’ve been sitting there the whole time letting me carry on about Tall, Dark and Handsome, and you didn’t tell me you’ve met someone! Get back here, Lorraine Wickes!”

 

            Lorraine laughed at him, and went up the stairs to her own flat. “See you on Saturday, Mikey.”


	4. Chapter 4

            “Where have you been?” Matt demanded, opening the door to Blade.

 

            “Shopping,” Blade said, holding up several plastic Sainsburys bags, which were cutting into his hands. “Didn’t Finn tell you? Fancy letting me in?”

 

            Matt got reluctantly out of the way. “Finn did tell me, but I was worried. Please tell me you weren’t out stalking this Lorraine Wickes.”

 

            Blade gave him a blank stare. “No.”

 

            “Thank God,” Matt said fervently, relieving him of some of the shopping bags and helping him take them through to the kitchen. “I know you felt strongly about her-”

 

            “Feel,” Blade corrected, before he could stop himself. A thudding from upstairs announced Finn’s appearance.

 

            Matt gave him a funny look, and finger-combed dark brown hair out of his face. It badly needed cutting. “-but honest, she doesn’t know who you are. Things have changed. There’s no point frightening an innocent bystander.”

 

            Finn, halfway down the stairs, stopped to close his eyes in despair and pinch the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. Blade felt the corners of his mouth twitch at the sight; it was good to know he had an ally, and Finn could be a bit dim, but he was solid. Matt, who had his back to Finn, turned suspiciously; Finn gave him a beaming smile of surpassing gormlessness. Matt shook his head in exasperation, and dumped the bags on the kitchen table.

 

            “She must have been bloody special to you,” he declared, sounding frustrated. “Normally you-”

 

            “Yes,” Blade said quietly, before Matt could finish his sentence, turned his back on Matt, and started packing things into the fridge. Blade couldn’t see his friend, but he knew that Matt would be staring at him in astonishment, and suppressed his irritation with some difficulty.

 

            Finn clapped him on the shoulder. “Matt, mate. Shut up.”

 

            Matt started to sputter. Blade beat a retreat, but couldn’t stop himself hearing their next few sentences.

 

            “I was going to say, normally if he has to he lets people go without fuss! And he _does_ have to!”

 

            “You don’t get it. Trust me, you don’t. It was always hard to believe if you never saw them together, or if you only saw them in office hours, but... yeah. They were great. He was happy. Let it go, yeah?”

 

            Blade shot up the stairs like a scalded cat to take refuge in his own room, scattering a woozy, much-medicated Ross who went “Wuh? Whozit? Blade?” and collapsed back into his bedroom to nurse a new scar. Matt came up to talk to him, possibly to apologise, but he had shot the bolt across, and didn’t answer. And in any case, within only a few seconds, Finn chased Matt down and dragged him away.

 

            Blade was thoroughly grateful for the reprieve. He lay on his bed, looking up through the Velux window, and tried to sort his head out. The sky was clouded over; it looked like a black-and-white relief, clouds lit eerily by the invisible moon. His room was cold, and with his jacket and shoes off he was left chilly in a shirt and jeans, but he hardly noticed it. His mind wasn’t reeling; instead, it felt like it was swimming in freezing waters, numbed and slowed and hurting, halfway to drowning.

 

            He started with the most obvious fact; he had walked out of a perfectly routine anomaly and found his girlfriend gone. Not just gone, but someone that he had never known, because of a timeline change. But he _did_ know her. She just didn’t know _him_ , and that was a massive, fundamental problem, because he had seven or eight months’ worth of memories of her, and she had nothing. She didn’t even know he _existed_.

 

             That much made absolutely clear, he moved onto a smaller, more tangential problem; no-one except Pink and Finn seemed to understand the effect this was having on him. Lester was a cold-blooded bastard who had barely acknowledged the fact that any of his staff had personal lives, but before the anomaly Matt had understood that Lorraine wasn’t like anyone else Blade had been with. For one thing, no-one had ever stuck around so long or put so much trust in him; that was why he’d always found it easy to let go, before. For another, Blade felt more for her than he was willing to admit, even to himself – it made him vulnerable and forced him to touch parts of himself he’d walled off a long, long time ago. Somehow, over a relatively short period of time, Lorraine had managed to become someone he wanted and needed to have around, someone who made him feel like he wasn’t the grenade with the pin half out that everyone else seemed to think he was.

 

            He was sick of pretending it didn’t hurt that she wasn’t there, and that she quite likely never would be again. That he didn’t know what he was walking into when he’d cut himself off from her. That he’d never even said goodbye. That if somehow there was some little bubble world where the timeline he belonged to carried on, she was there and grieving, and he never told her _I’m going, I’m sorry,_ maybe even _I love you_ ; he went without saying a word.

 

            Blade shuddered, and felt his hands curl automatically into fists. He gasped for breath, his eyes stinging furiously, angry and sad and angry and hurting and hurting and sad and angry and angry and sad and hurting, mixed up and in pain. Like the world had ended, and forgotten to take him with it.

 

            Forty-five minutes later, Finn knocked on the door with all his usual tact and delicacy. “Blade? Let me in.”

 

            Blade got up and unbolted the door. Nothing happened.

 

            “You’re going to have to open it for me,” Finn said helpfully. “Got my hands full.”  


            Blade growled and opened the door. Finn appeared, with a tray containing a large bowl of spaghetti bolognaise, a glass of water, and a mug of villainously strong tea. Blade blinked at it and then looked back at Finn, who made no mention of the redness around his eyes or the bleeding half-circles in his palms where his nails had cut into them.

 

            “Thought you’d be hungry,” Finn explained. “Don’t worry, Matt cooked it, not me. He said to tell you he’s sorry.”

 

            Blade grunted, and accepted the tray. “Thanks, mate.”

 

            Finn loitered for a moment as if he was trying to think what to say, and then treated him to a strangely sweet smile. “It’ll be fine. Promise.”

 

            Blade pretended that helped. He could see Finn didn’t believe him for a moment.

 

***

 

            At eight o’clock on Thursday morning, Lorraine put the schematics of the ARC and the ARC’s payroll, detailing each employee by full name, job, and salary, on Christine’s desk.

 

Christine picked them up and flipped through them, then treated Lorraine to an insincere smile. “Well done. I didn’t expect you to manage it.”

           

            “Thank you, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said colourlessly.

 

            Christine nodded absently, eyes running over the plans, and then said: “Did you hear that Lester’s building has been bombed out?”  


            Lorraine crushed her first impulse, which was to start in shock and make enquiries about the mortality rate. “No, ma’am. I had no idea.”

 

            “Try harder, Lorraine. Anyway, the damage doesn’t appear to be structural, but superficial. A couple of weeks’ work for a good contractor, if that, and the ARC will be functional again, if not beautiful. And it’s a government building, it’s _meant_ to be hideous.” Christine laid the plans down, and fixed Lorraine with a sharp eye. “I want to know which contractor is being used. It won’t have been put out to public tender on such short notice; James needs the building up and running as soon as possible. And I want you to put in an order with Moran and company for twenty concealed cameras and twenty concealed microphones, and make arrangements for them to be installed.”

 

            Lorraine kept her countenance. “Yes, Miss Johnson. Installed where?”

 

            “Photocopy the plans and I’ll mark the locations I want them in.” Christine handed back the schematics. “I need that done ASAP. After that, and this is equally high priority but less urgent, I want you to unearth the files on these people.” She handed over a piece of paper with six names on it. “Send Captain Ross up to me, as well.” 

 

            “Yes, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said evenly, and went out, trying very hard not to fume.

 

            She encountered Captain Wilder, probably the most experienced of Christine’s men, and one who had his head screwed on (as opposed to Lieutenant Dawson, whose head was certainly screwed on – just against the thread. Lorraine preferred not to deal with him, in case the temptation to wallop him with a parliamentary White Paper became overwhelming.) She smiled. “Captain. Have you seen Captain Ross?”

 

            “Yes, miss,” Captain Wilder said, and looked at her sideways, a smirk hidden behind a professional stony face. “Did you need him for something?”

 

            “Miss Johnson wants him up in her office yesterday,” Lorraine said, cooling her tone, looking down her nose at him and wishing the ground would swallow her up. “I’d appreciate it very much if you’d go and tell him so.”

 

            “Yes, miss.”

 

            “ _Now_ , captain.”

 

            “Yes, miss.”

 

            “Thank you,” Lorraine said, and stamped off to find the photocopier, mentally drafting an email to Mr Moran and running through all the likely suspects for rebuilding a classified area at short notice, a blessedly short – if obscure – list. She suspected this was going to be an exhausting week.

 

***

 

            By next Friday morning, Lorraine was both shattered and more than convinced that Christine was planning a coup. Moran had not been difficult about getting the bugs, although he had hiked the price up because Christine had wanted them at such short notice and Christine had complained about that vilely and then doubled the order, which hadn’t improved matters. Lorraine was highly suspicious about Christine’s choices of places to bug, and growing more uneasy by the day – this was more than just a little friendly inter-departmental espionage. Furthermore, Christine had hired someone to install them who Lorraine didn’t trust as far as she could throw him, and recognised as a born criminal and a first-rate chancer, performing the kind of work Lorraine would have expected from MI6 agents on a mercenary basis. His behaviour towards her had also been thoroughly objectionable from the moment he was hired, until Captain Ross had got him by himself in a corner and had a little chat with him, at which point he had avoided her like the plague. While personally satisfying, this constituted a serious obstruction to Lorraine’s duties, which included keeping tabs on him and squaring his existence and salary with the Powers That Be.

 

            The next stumbling block had been discovering which contractor was due to do the repair work on the ARC, and by the time she did find out, after several red herrings, pulling a lot of strings, and calling in a favour or two, Lorraine was ready either to set up a shrine to Jenny Lewis or strangle the woman. Although nominally head of PR, Jenny functioned as operations manager to the ARC too, and had apparently hired and vetted an entirely separate small local company that had never held a major government contract and that barely had a website, giving Lorraine no end of a headache. Lorraine appreciated this as a way of warding off fixers and nosy people like herself, but felt strongly that she could have done without the fuss.

 

            Finally, with Christine throwing tantrums so regular Lorraine could almost set her watch by them and also practically seducing the Minister, her pet criminal, her head of security Captain Wilder and anyone else who fell under her eye, a sure sign that she was under stress, Lorraine battled her way through to the final problem: the files. She had not expected to find this difficult. She had connections, contacts and spider diagrams of people to call in every conceivable circumstance, and was confident that retrieving a few files wouldn’t pose a problem. Her first contact turned up the required six files, but heavily redacted and cut, and when Lorraine sent a stiff email reminding them of her security clearance, the person on whose behalf she was making the request, and that fact that she knew perfectly well that more extensive files existed, she was ignored. Christine not only told Lorraine off for not getting the more extensive files, but also slapped her across the face with the thinner files, making Lorraine’s fingers itch to slap _her_. And not with paper files, either.  

 

            Lorraine began making the rounds of the various branches of intelligence agencies, and issued a straight query to the MoD for Captain Becker’s file, which got her a prompt and helpful answer. Sarah Page and Danny Quinn proved only a little more difficult, and even the holder of Jenny Lewis’ file (and how they came to be held by so many people Lorraine didn’t care to think about, but was very definite on its being untidy, inefficient, and generally useless) succumbed to a couple of brisk phone calls and gratuitous dropping of Christine’s name into the conversation. However, Connor Temple and Abby Maitland’s files were wrapped in more security than the Houses of Parliament; probably, Lorraine guessed, because they were original members of the project. Lorraine had to suffer through having her emails stone-walled, her phone calls given nondescript answers and eventually a face-to-face meeting in order to get hold of them, and by that time she was consciously avoiding Christine and thinking wistfully of thumbscrews. It was with a strong sense of satisfaction, and a lingering impulse to brain Christine, that Lorraine received the files and handed them over to Christine on Friday morning.

 

            “I’m sorry it took such a long time,” she said, lying through her teeth; she knew perfectly well that it could easily have taken months to extract the files if she hadn’t had a reasonable idea of where to look, a fairly widespread reputation for soul-numbing persistence, and Christine’s name to use for intimidation purposes. “I’m certain these are the full files.”

 

            Christine took them with barely a nod, skim-read slowly through them with icy eyes, looked up at Lorraine and smiled. “Good.”

 

            “Thank you,” Lorraine said, eyes glued to a heavy paperweight on Christine’s desk within easy reach.

 

            “You can have the rest of the day off,” Christine decided, smiling more nicely and with enough insincerity to sink a small battleship. “Really, Lorraine. You look like you’re making yourself ill.”

 

            Lorraine was well aware that Christine’s unpredictability was one of her greatest assets, but she was nonetheless caught unawares and had to quickly close her gaping mouth and stifle a retort along the lines of ‘and whose fault is that?’. “I’m sorry, Miss Johnson? I don’t think I quite...”

 

            “Rest of the day off,” Christine ordered, sounding deceptively nice. “You need the rest.”

 

            “Thank you, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said, and decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. She packed up her things and left the building as quickly as possible before Miss Johnson could change her mind or someone call on her for help.

 

            It was a beautiful sunny day, the sort of crisp, bright early autumn weather that made Lorraine regret that she drove to work, since it was a little too far to bicycle, and she was deliriously glad to be out of the office and free of work for once in her life, even if only for a few days. She turned on the radio and wound down her window to let a little of the cool air in, counteracting the sun’s heat. She decided to go for a bicycle ride when she got home; she hadn’t had time for much exercise lately, and was beginning to get cabin fever. Plus, it would help work off some of her frustration.

 

            The only bright spot in her week had been Captain Ross. Being possessed of a certain amount of common sense and aware that Lorraine was tired, stressed and rapidly reaching the end of her tether, he had backed off about asking her out, but stayed close enough to talk to and sometimes brought her coffee, which she appreciated. Christine was keeping both of them thoroughly busy, so there wasn’t time for anything more- but Lorraine found that what they managed was enough to keep her from losing her temper, mind, or job. She wasn’t certain she wanted more the way he did, but she liked him, she found him attractive, and she didn’t run out of things to talk to him about, so perhaps it was worth a try. Something to think about when work calmed down a bit, she decided, parking as neatly as possible in a very small space in Lime Gardens Square.

 

            Lorraine went upstairs, changed out of her work clothes into the cropped sports trousers she wore to exercise, a t-shirt and trainers, grabbed her helmet and went back downstairs again to get her bicycle off the rack in the hall. As an afterthought, she put her house keys, a bike chain, a bottle of water and her purse in a mini backpack and slipped that on as well; maybe she could go to a café and get lunch out, as a treat. Ten minutes’ bicycling and traffic-dodging found her in Wandsworth Park, and she stopped for a drink of water before starting on a circuit of the park that she used to do all the time until she’d started working for Christine, at which point it had become exponentially harder to find free time or energy for exercise.  She found the familiarity soothing, and couldn’t stop herself smiling as she stopped at the end of three circuits for a break, calf and thigh muscles twinging in protest, stretched perfunctorily, and flopped on a bench in the sunshine. She’d forgotten how much she enjoyed this route. It was peaceful, uncomplicated and everything her job wasn’t.

 

            She basked in the sunshine for only a few moments more before having it forcibly brought home to her by a grumbling stomach that breakfast had been six hours ago, and had consisted of coffee and a banana. Bowing to the inevitable, she got up and started the route home, but stopped off at a café that had wireless internet, no Taylor Swift in the piped music and excellent grilled sandwiches. It had been one of the first local discoveries she’d made when she moved into Lime Gardens, and was still the place where she met up with Mikey for gossip and brunch.

 

            She chained her bike to the railings, pinched a copy of the _Times_ from the rack inside and took an outside table, where she could avoid the clientele that had fled inside at the first sign of autumn, keep an eye on her bike and enjoy the sunshine, which she felt starved of after her time closeted in the office. After only a few moments, one of the waitresses recognised her and brought her a menu and five minutes’ conversation that basically ran along the lines of enquiries about how Lorraine was feeling, she looked so tired, how Mikey was, and a brisk cross-examination as to why Lorraine hardly ever came to Antonia’s any more. Lorraine reciprocated with all the polite things to say, enjoying a conversation with someone who wasn’t bound by the Official Secrets Act, asking after the owner Antonia (who could be accused of egotism in naming her café, but not bad cooking) and the waitress herself, and then ordered a pot of tea and a grilled cheese, ham and tomato sandwich with salad on the side. The waitress took the order and excused herself, and Lorraine settled down to wait while the café filled up with the lunchtime rush, flipping idly through the _Times_.

 

            She noticed the stranger out for a run, of course, in a passive sort of way. At roughly the same time her tea arrived, she caught sight of him jogging down the other side of the street and absent-mindedly noticed the fact that he was really good-looking, tanned, tall, dark and-

 

            Wait.

 

            The runner stopped and crossed the busy street, heading for Antonia’s. Lorraine felt something grip the base of her spine and tug. Tall, dark and handsome. Who had said that? _“You’ve been sitting there the whole time letting me carry on about Tall, Dark and Handsome, and you didn’t tell me you’ve met someone! Get back here, Lorraine Wickes!”_

 

Mikey. Mikey, of course, Mikey, who noticed everything, particularly if it happened to be male and good-looking. Lorraine’s fingers clenched and gripped the paper, mirroring the uneasy twisting in the pit of her stomach, and she thought about whether she should get up and go, leave money on the table to pay for the meal and get out of there. No: it was too late to do that and escape unnoticed. The runner was on this side of the street now. She very much doubted that she could slip away on foot, and grabbing her bike would be too slow.

 

            In any case, her lunch had just arrived. “Here you go,” said the waitress, “one grilled cheese ham and tomato on rye bread with side-salad. Enjoy!” she beamed, and Lorraine returned a rather faint smile.

 

            She folded the newspaper, laid it to one side and began to make a start on her sandwich. Her best chance of going unnoticed, she felt, was to act as if nothing special was going on, and she forced herself to calm down as the runner turned into Antonia’s, going past her without a glance, looked round and then came back out again. Her stomach tied itself in knots as he came closer and then hesitated just before approaching her table. Finally, she looked up and met his eyes, hand clenching hard on the blunt, useless knife that came with her sandwich as she noticed that they were a very bright, almost unnatural green: her guess had been right. This was the man who had come to her door asking for her sister – and why? Any real friend of Jacinth’s would surely know she didn’t live in London, let alone with her younger sister, so there had to be some other motive in play; there was a small chance that he was looking for a Jacinth completely unrelated to Jacinth Wickes, but it could as easily be a ploy to catch her attention and lead her into a trap of some kind. She forced herself to keep her voice light, but knew there was an edge of antagonism in it anyway. “Is something wrong?”

 

            “Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked. “There aren’t any tables free.”

 

            Oh, _hell_. Lorraine bit her tongue. She knew she ought to say no, knew there was a chance he presented a real threat to her, and remembered vividly Mikey’s description of him, which had left Lorraine with the abiding impression that the stranger was lethal. But this man didn’t quite fit Mikey’s intensely detailed description; there was a hesitancy in his eyes that didn’t fit with the assured, dangerous man Mikey had described, and he wasn’t acting like a threat. He _looked_ like one close up, certainly, several inches taller than her, much stronger, and – going by the haircut and muscle tone – army for certain. And Lorraine was uncomfortably aware that she hated carrying a gun and had deliberately left it in the office for months now. But his body language was unthreatening and she couldn’t see any weapons on him...

 

            The man took a half step back, and Lorraine was surprised to see that for half a second he looked indescribably sad, before his face went unnaturally blank. She was instantly suspicious; that didn’t fit with the minor irritation of being rejected by a complete stranger. “Sorry,” he said gruffly, and took another step back. “I should have realised- sorry.”

 

            “No,” Lorraine said impulsively, cursing herself for being a soft touch and stupidly inquisitive about the thought processes of a man she didn’t know and almost certainly never would. “No. You can sit here if you like – I’m not expecting anyone. Sorry, I’ve had a lousy couple of weeks at work and I’m not thinking straight.”

 

            The man treated her to a warm half-smile that melted her heart and made the part of her brain that had taken her MI6 training so well jump up and down, yelling that just because he had a nice smile was no reason to trust him. Reflexively, she smiled back, and he sat down opposite her. “Thanks.”

 

            “No problem,” Lorraine said, and went back to her lunch. The waitress, run off her feet, came back out again, was loudly and flirtatiously pleased that he’d managed to find somewhere to sit and took his order for coffee. Lorraine hid a smile in the corner of her mouth, and sneaked a glance at him. She couldn’t blame Tiff for fancying him or Mikey for being so struck by him he’d given a description of him that would have filled a small encyclopaedia - he was stunning in a tough sort of way, and those eyes were really remarkable. With a start, she realised he’d caught her looking, and was smiling himself. She turned away and muttered “Sorry,” applying herself exclusively to her meal, and thinking that she really ought to be more embarrassed. She knew she would have been if Adam had caught her looking at him like that.

 

            “Don’t worry about it,” he said quietly, clearly amused. She caught a faint accent in his words, and set herself to trying to identifying it. Yorkshire, probably. “My name’s Niall, by the way.”

 

            Definitely Yorkshire. She swallowed a mouthful of grilled cheese and ham and said: “Lorraine.”

 

            “Are you done with the paper, Lorraine?”

 

            She nodded. “Feel free.”

 

            “Thanks,” Niall said, and picked up the paper and skimmed through it, before turning to the sports pages and reading a rude article about the Harlequins. He thanked Tiff with a nod and very small smile when she brought him his coffee, but proved resistant to efforts to start a conversation; Lorraine felt a tiny spark of smugness that she’d got him talking.

 

            The rest of the meal passed in silence, although Lorraine glanced up from the remains of her side-salad to catch him with his eyes on her and he went faintly pink, grinned at her and buried himself in the newspaper again. She was almost sorry when she finished her lunch and paid her bill, and it was time to go. “Bye,” she said, and gave him another small smile. “Thanks for the company.”

 

            He returned the smile with interest. “Thanks for sharing your table,” he said, and she unlocked her bike and pushed off into the mainstream of traffic; there was no point hanging back.


	5. Chapter 5

            “You look pleased with yourself,” Finn commented when Blade got back home.

 

            Blade just grinned at him.

 

            Finn sighed, sounding martyred. “You can’t have seen her. It’s a Friday, she’ll be at work.”

 

            “She wasn’t,” Blade said smugly, knowing that Matt was still on shift at the ARC and Ross was off his head on painkillers and that he could therefore talk about Lorraine as much as he liked for a while.

 

            “What did you do, chat her up?” Finn demanded.

 

            Blade shook his head. “No. Sat at the same table as her, she was at a café. Talked to her a bit. Not much. She seemed okay with it.”

 

            Finn grinned. “You know, you might not fuck this up beyond repair.”

 

            Blade stuck his middle finger up at him. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. What d’you want for lunch? I’m starving.”

 

***

 

            The phone call from Christine at 7.15 am naturally came as something of a surprise to Lorraine, who was just finishing a cup of coffee and was obliged to dash to grab her phone. “Hello,” she said, interrogatively.

 

            “Lorraine. How fast can you be at work?”

 

            Lorraine, having gathered that it was Christine on the phone, made a few mental calculations and said: “In a bit more than half an hour. I was just about to leave.”

 

            “Hmm. I see. I’m having a meeting with the Minister in fifteen minutes, and I will be done half an hour after that, and when I am done, I expect to see you outside the Minister’s door.”

 

            “Yes, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said, slightly taken aback. She knew perfectly well that no such meeting had been scheduled, and certainly no appointment had been made. “Is there any special occasion? Should I be prepared to...?”

 

            “Can you prepare for a takeover of James Lester’s amateurish little operation?” Christine said disdainfully.

 

            Lorraine sat down rather hard on a chair. So this was the coup Christine had been planning.  “Not really, ma’am.”

 

            “No. I didn’t think so either. We will, however, be returning to headquarters after my meeting. I will expect you to collect the gun you think I don’t know you don’t carry, and bring it with you to Lester’s kennel, as well as anything in particular you think you might need to establish control over the inner workings of his operation. I expect you to facilitate the integration smoothly.”

 

            “Certainly, ma’am,” Lorraine said.

 

            Christine ended the call.

 

            Lorraine spared a moment to gape in astonishment, and then shot up from her seat, grabbed her bag and keys, and charged out of her front door to find her car. Pushing a sensible, boring, well-maintained car to the edge of the speed limit got her to the office in record time, and she had been to the Minister’s office, trailing behind Christine, so many times that she knew the way almost as well as she knew her favourite cycle routes. Nonetheless, she barely had time to catch her breath before Christine came marching out of the Minister’s office with a cat-like smile on her face, acknowledging Lorraine with a bare nod before continuing down the corridor. She was carrying a letter and being shadowed by a po-faced Captain Wilder, who gave Lorraine a small smile.

 

            “Good morning, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said.

 

            “Lorraine. How did you get here?”

 

            “By car,” Lorraine said.

 

            “In that case, go and find your car and head back to Headquarters as quickly as you can.” She handed over the letter. “Take this with you. I want it photocopied and the copy locked away in the safe. And call Captain Ross. Tell him to make sure sections one and two are ready to go.” 

 

            “Yes, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said, spotted a short-cut, and took it.

 

            She saw Christine’s car ready and waiting, the driver looking far more alert than usual, as she swung out of her parking place and into the mainstream of traffic. Putting Christine out of her mind, she tucked the letter into her bag on the passenger seat, put on her Bluetooth headset and called Captain Ross.

 

            He answered the phone on the first ring. “Miss Wickes?”

 

            “Miss Johnson says to make sure that sections one and two are ready to go.”

 

            “Yes, miss.” Lorraine heard him give orders, and, even more faintly, the sound of affirmatives and tramping boots.

 

            “It’s all moving, isn’t it?” she said.

 

            “Yes, miss. Where are you?”

 

            “In my car, coming into work.”

 

            “What’s your ETA?”

 

            “Give me half an hour, forty minutes at the outside. About half-past eight.”

 

            “Orders are to move out at nine, but it might be sooner than that the way Miss Johnson is going. I should be faster than Miss Johnson, if I were you.”

 

            “Don’t worry,” Lorraine said, pulling out of a traffic light and turning onto a relatively clear main road. “There are snails that drive faster than Trevor does.”

 

            Captain Ross did not laugh. “Have you seen anyone around lately? Anyone you don’t recognise?”

 

            Lorraine thought of the stranger in the café. “Why?”

 

            “I’ve heard more about the nutcase on Ryan’s old crew. He’s been showing odd behaviour, out of character, and he’s looking for someone, a woman. Anomalies would turn anyone’s head, but I can’t think of anyone more lethal to lose his mind.”

 

            “What makes you think it’s me?” Lorraine said tartly.

 

            Silence on the end of the line.

 

            “I’m not being followed,” Lorraine reassured him. “I would have noticed a tail. Do you have any more information on him? Such as an actual name?”

 

            “I have a name,” Captain Ross agreed. “Niall Richards. Corporal Niall Richards.”

 

            Lorraine nearly squashed a cyclist, who swore at her. “Niall Richards,” she repeated, and heard her voice cool and steady and didn’t understand how it got like that. “I’ll remember that name.”

 

            “You should,” Captain Ross said grimly. “I don’t know who he’s after, my contact didn’t know, but I’ve got a very bad feeling about this. Listen, Miss Wickes. I’ve got the Glock you were issued and a shoulder holster, I’m going to go and put it on your desk. Wear the damned thing.”

 

            “If you insist,” Lorraine said. “See you in a few minutes, Captain.” She ended the call and ripped off the headset. The man in the café had been called Niall, and he had undoubtedly been a dangerous man, well-hidden though his skills appeared to be, and he’d come to her door before coming to her table at Antonia’s. Looking for someone, a woman... maybe he’d found her.

 

            Lorraine resisted the temptation to call Captain Ross back and tell him about the man who seemed to be following her around. She could deal with this herself, at some time when her employer wasn’t expecting her to deal with the fallout of a coup. And in the meantime... Yes. She would carry that Glock.      Only sensible. And she knew she was a decent shot, even if she didn’t know if she could shoot at a live, human target, much less to kill.

 

            She swung into the car-park of the headquarters, acknowledging Private Keynes with a half-nod, and told herself that she should not feel quite so sick at the thought of putting a bullet between Niall’s green eyes. Not when he might be out to kill her.

 

***

 

            Pink – really better addressed as Scott Floyd, unless you were _very_ sure of yourself – was on sentry duty when four jeeps, followed by a sleek, low car, drew up outside the ARC. Every hair on the back of his neck bristling, he sent a message to Captain Becker and waited for the challenge.

 

            It came. Men climbed out of the jeeps, armed men in combats, and Pink sent another message urgently requesting back-up and calling for orders. Then he nearly fell over, because two women climbed out of the car, and he recognised one of them. He could guess that the woman with the false smile and blue eyes was Christine Johnson, but he knew perfectly well that the quiet, dark-skinned woman following her just a step behind was Lorraine Wickes, and he could see she was armed.

 

            “Oh, shit,” he said aloud, and grabbed his walkie-talkie. “Captain Becker, Captain Becker, come in.”

 

            “Private Floyd. What is it?” crackled the reply. The captain sounded exasperated, which was not altogether unusual, but he also sounded urgent and out of breath.

 

            “Thirty soldiers and two women, approaching main entrance. Soldiers aren’t wearing uniforms I recognise and they’re heavily armed. I think one of the women is Christine Johnson and I can’t see if she’s armed or not, but the other is Lorraine Wickes, and she _is_ armed. One pistol in a shoulder holster. What are my orders?”

 

            Brief silence, and then: “Get inside and down to the rec room and await further orders. Don’t try to hinder them.”

 

            “Yes, sir,” Floyd said, slipping out of the sentry box and into the main ARC. Behind him, he heard a crash, and knew that one of the jeeps had taken out the barrier he had not lifted before leaving and smashed it to pieces. He wished them luck with the tiger trap, which he had also failed to lower.

 

            “Floyd-“

 

            “Yes, sir?” Awkward bloody timing, Floyd thought, running down a corridor.

 

            “The ARC is bugged, we don’t know to what extent. Be careful what you say. In here, Miss Maitland!”

 

            “Yes, sir,” Floyd said, caroming off Finn and crashing into Blade, who grabbed him.

 

            “There are armed men coming into the ARC,” he said rapidly. “Chelsea on reception was too frightened to stop them. Lorraine’s with them! What the fuck’s going on?”

 

            “Yeah, I know,” Floyd said, disengaging himself from what felt like rather too firm a grip. “Captain Hairspray said not to stop ’em and that the ARC is bugged.”

 

            “Fuck!” Finn said, expressing all three men’s feelings on the subject. “He have any other friendly advice?”

 

            Floyd nodded. “Go to the rec room and await orders.”

 

            Finn breathed in strongly through his nose. “And what d’you think he means us to do when they come in with their fucking _sub-machine guns_ and shoot us all to hell?”

 

            Floyd spread his hands. “You think I know?”

 

            “No,” Finn said promptly.

 

            Floyd rubbed his chin. “May as well. Orders. And I don’t think there’s anything else we can do, see?”          

 

            Blade bit his tongue. “I don’t care what you two do. I’m going to the drum.”

 

            “Where Lorraine is?” Finn grinned. “I ought to take the piss out of you for that.”

 

            Even as he spoke, all three men froze as they heard the heavy sound of boots. Floyd saw Finn make a speedy decision, and shove Blade hard away from the sound. “Go!”

 

            Blade ran, disappearing around the corner. Floyd stared after him, and then turned to Finn. “I hope you know what the fuck we’re doing- _Dduw_!”

 

            “Dew?” Finn said, looking puzzled. “What’s dew got to do with anything?”

 

            “I said ‘Dduw’,” Floyd said patiently, and pointed at the men in grey combats who had just rounded the corner, and were yelling at them to put their hands up. “It means ‘oh God’, but what I meant to say was ‘oh, fuck’.”

 

            “Whatever you say, mate,” Finn said, polite in his incomprehension, and raised his hands. “Hey, what the hell’s going on here?”

 

***

 

            Lorraine had run into a problem; Lester’s secretary was afraid of her. She had introduced herself to the woman, who looked blonde and stolid, and held out her hand to shake – but instead of immediately taking it, Claire had leapt back, looking frankly terrified, and shaken her hand only after a significant pause and as gingerly as if Lorraine was offering her half a dead shark. She was trying to be nice, although she was rapidly losing patience with the frightened stuttering, incomplete answers and distracted glances into the atrium at the ARC’s soldiers being rounded up, because she did need the woman to familiarise her with the filing system and other important details of the ARC’s day-to-day running, which Christine would doubtless expect her to supervise. When she felt she’d grasped the bare essentials, she sent Claire off with great relief to photocopy things, and went to find Captain Becker.

 

            She wasn’t sure how she felt about Captain Becker. He was undoubtedly easy on the eyes, and she knew he was a good soldier; but she felt there was something untrustworthy about the way he’d defected to Christine without a fight. He was certainly disloyal to either Lester or Christine, and Lorraine intended to find out which. It wasn’t that she didn’t sympathise if he intended to work from the inside to bring back Lester, but she was bound to prevent the attempt succeeding. It was her job, after all.

 

            She found Captain Becker easily enough, and her request for him to explain the security system and give her access to the CCTV cameras was granted. His professionalism was remarkable as he explained the system clearly and carefully, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was too smooth, too acquiescent, and certainly much too pleased with himself. Years in MI6 had taught Lorraine to put trust in her instincts, and right now they were telling her that Captain Becker was not the turncoat Christine thought she had made him.

 

            It was on the way out of Captain Becker’s tiny corner of an office, having left him going in the other direction to dance attendance on Christine, that she saw the man from the café again. It was a glimpse in the corner of her vision, too fleeting to be sure, but she felt a hand squeeze her heart roughly and felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck; either she was seeing things, which seemed unlikely, or she was being followed. The man from the café, then, wasn’t just Niall or the man who had been looking for her sister at her flat – he was Niall Richards, the ARC soldier looking for an unnamed woman, looking for _her_. She remembered everything Captain Ross had said about him: lethal, clinical, inhuman, someone Lorraine should take out first for her own safety - and that advice had not been given lightly. However badly this tallied with the man she’d seen, she _had_ to keep it in mind. He might have been acting his uncertainty and normality that day in the café, and she couldn’t afford to take chances.

 

            Lorraine’s steps had faltered. With an effort, she began to walk again, resisting the temptation to draw the Glock – even if it didn’t quite suit her hand, it was some protection – with difficulty. She plunged deeper and deeper into the ARC, calling on her luck and her memories of the schematics, and hoping like hell that she was right. If she wasn’t, she might be leading herself and her tail into a blind alley, a dead end, a quiet, dusty, unused spot which would be an ideal killing ground.

 

            She felt an overwhelming burst of relief as she realised that her memory had not played her false, and that she had, indeed, made it down to the cells, currently swarming with Captain Ross’ troops and a lot of disgruntled men in black combats locked into the cells. She straightened her back, composed her face and walked swiftly into the centre of the chaos- and then all her usual composure dropped off her face and she stared in outrage at what was happening.

 

            Most of the men in black had been locked away, but one, a pleasant if slightly dim-looking lad probably a little younger than Lorraine, was outside the cells. More importantly, as Lorraine had turned the corner, a punch had knocked his head back and laid him out flat on the floor, his head cracking on the floor with a sick, hard sound, leading to howls of rage from the cells.

 

            Lorraine gasped impotently for a moment, struggling to push words past the block of utter fury in her throat, and then the soldier’s assailant drew back his foot for a solid kick in the stomach and Lorraine found words flowing easily. “Lieutenant _Dawson_!” she barked, in a tone she hadn’t used since her twin brothers had pinched her calculator while she was in the middle of revision for her finals at Cambridge. “ _Stop_!”

 

            Lieutenant Dawson, caught off balance, stumbled and whirled to see who had shouted at him. A significant chunk of Christine’s men, who had been cheering him on, now looked like they’d been caught with their hands in the sweetie jar, and the men in the cells fell silent. The soldier on the floor stirred and groaned, bringing a hand up to his head. Lorraine shared out an angry glare indiscriminately, and spoke words that were now queuing up on her tongue to be hissed with an aggression she’d never resorted to before. “Kicking a man when he’s down, Lieutenant? How _very_ like you. Exactly the kind of small-minded, amoral cruelty I would expect, and I _will_ be reporting it to Captain Wilder, who _will_ have you court-martialled, and I hope you’re kicked out on your ear, Lieutenant, because I haven’t dealt with you for eighteen months without knowing more about your vicious, bloodthirsty and frankly disgusting behaviour than I ever wanted to. Step away from him at once. Corporal Meredith, Private Tyler, you will please escort Lieutenant Dawson to one of the empty labs and stand guard over him there until Captain Wilder gives you further orders.”

 

            “You think I need to obey your orders?” Lieutenant Dawson sneered. Lorraine cursed. Of all the people to make difficulties about her admittedly theoretical authority... of course her giving orders wasn’t a problem if she was _helping_ them, but she knew that the moment she had to tell them to do something they didn’t like, she was on shaky ground.

 

            “You mean you think you don’t, Lieutenant?” Captain Ross said frostily, appearing behind Lorraine. She kept a lid on the smug smile threatening to unfold, making her face blank and neutral; gloating would only make this more of a mess. “Well, you’ll have to be re-educated, then. Corporal Meredith, Private Tyler. You know where you get your orders from.”

 

            The two men Ross and Lorraine had named stepped out of the crowd and flanked Lieutenant Dawson; Tyler looked apprehensive, Meredith stolid, but they marched Dawson away.

 

            “You’ve made an enemy of him, Lorraine,” Captain Ross commented quietly.

 

            “That’s not my immediate concern, _Captain_ ,” Lorraine said, giving him a pointed we-are-still-on-duty look. She nodded at the man who’d been beaten up, who was still lying on the floor, eyelids flickering drunkenly. One of the soldiers in the cells, a mischievous-looking man with thick brown hair and worried brown eyes, was crouching down inside the cell and reaching out to him through the bars, talking softly but getting no response. “Someone is to get this man down to the infirmary now, diagnose, treat and document whatever it is Lieutenant Dawson’s done to him. I wouldn’t place bets on his having a nasty concussion.”   

 

            The most competent medic looked slightly embarrassed and shifted forward. Lorraine sighed. “What is it?”

 

            “The dispensary is locked,” he said sheepishly. “We don’t have the keys, and breaking down the door would be...”

 

            “Stupid,” Lorraine filled in. “Have you tried _asking_ them for the key? Politely?”

 

            Even Captain Ross boggled at her, the notion of asking apparently being totally foreign to them, which explained why they were soldiers and not hard-working, much-harassed fixers of everyone else’s problems, like Lorraine. Lorraine pinched her nose and took a deep breath, reflecting that they were absolutely no different from her heathen younger brothers. Then she marched over to the cells, and addressed the men there. “I imagine one of you has the key to the dispensary. Will the person in possession of it be so good as to put it on the floor outside the cell he, or she, is in, so that your friend on the floor can get medical care as soon as possible?”

 

            Much as Lorraine had expected, the key appeared from someone’s pocket and clattered onto the floor in front of the cells. She treated them to a nice smile, picked up the key, and handed it over to the free medic. “There.”

 

            Captain Ross sighed. “Why aren’t you running the country, Miss Wickes?”

 

            Lorraine grinned with the satisfaction of a problem tidily resolved. “Far too much work, Captain.”

 

            Then there was a shout of “What the _fuck_?” from the men carrying the unidentified soldier off to the infirmary, and all hell broke loose. Captain Ross shoved Lorraine to the floor, and she realised, with a sinking feeling, that she had forgotten all about the probably armed and certainly dangerous man following her around the ARC, which was – to say the least – not bright of her. Clearly his stealth skills had failed as badly as her memory had, because the next thing she knew after the dizzy confusion of yelling and swearing and fighting, Captain Ross had hauled her off the floor and the man who had been following her was kneeling on the floor with someone’s knee in his back. She inhaled strongly. It was the man from the café. She had been sure before, but now she was certain, and she had the proof in front of her, undeniable evidence that Captain Ross had been right when he had guessed that she was the woman Niall Richards was searching for. Niall Richards was also dressed in the same uniform as Lester’s men, which just added levels and levels of ‘oh dear’ to this situation, considering the fact that he was on the wrong side of a coup she had helped to conduct. Lorraine felt a headache coming on.

 

            _I need a Venn diagram to cope with this mess_ , she thought despairingly, and gently detached Captain Ross’s hand from her upper arm. He suddenly seemed very solid and reassuring, but he was also glaring at the kneeling man – at _Niall_ – like a beating wasn’t out of the question, and Lorraine was startled to find a protective instinct coming into play. She knew, rationally speaking, that she needed to question this Niall person, and in the cells next to all his mates and with an audience of her colleagues was not the best place to do that. Worse yet, it would bring the mess to Christine’s attention, and Lorraine didn’t make a habit of bleeding in shark-infested waters. But she could also feel her feet itching to step between Captain Ross and Niall and break that glare; the two men were staring furiously at each other with a kind of burning clarity that left Lorraine not at all sure that they wouldn’t have been trying to kill each other under other circumstances.

 

            She curled her toes in her shoes, and coughed loudly to break the tension, or at least end the staring match. “I see you’ve found my tail.”

 

            “ _What_?” Captain Ross swung around like a striking snake. Lorraine told herself not to flinch, and couldn’t tell how much success she had met with.

 

            She made an effort, and managed to raise an eyebrow. “Yes. He’s been following me for about the past fifteen minutes, I think. Why did you think I came down here? I was going to mention it,” she added, giving Captain Ross a look that, had there been any justice in the world, would have reminded him that she had just witnessed a major departure from orders by one of his men. “But I was... otherwise occupied.”

 

            Captain Ross’s eyes flashed wide open with anger, and his mouth set in a thin line; Lorraine bit the inside of her lip and held his gaze. She wouldn’t look away. No, _really_...

 

            He broke first, with a huff of irritation, and turned away. “Sling him in with the rest,” he ordered curtly, and added sharply: “Miss Wickes, a word? In private?”

 

            “Of course,” Lorraine said levelly. “If you can find such a thing as privacy in this building.”

             

             Captain Ross looked coldly at her, and marched away. She blinked hard and set her jaw, feeling curious eyes resting on her and remembering again why she hated being the focus of attention, and walked after him. Not too fast. No need to make it easy for him, or make him think that she’d catch up with him quickly, eager to explain her reasoning with bullet-points and a flipchart if necessary. She was a professional, too.

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

            Sergeant Yates drew his breath in sharply, whistling through the gap in his front teeth, and Private Chakrabati snickered. “Wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Miss Wickes,” he observed, pushing Blade into the cell with a solid shove to the back and casually locking it again. “Bloody hell, and we thought Miss Johnson was a ball-buster.”

 

            “Cut it out, Private,” Sergeant Yates warned.

 

            Chakrabati raised his hands, grinning. “No disrespect, sarge.”

 

            Sergeant Yates gave him a withering look. “Enjoy your three a.m. patrol.” He glanced sharply at the cells for a moment, certain two of the prisoners were whispering to each other, but when he looked they were silent and blank-faced.

 

***

 

            “Just for future reference,” Pink muttered to Blade, “you’re a fucking _idiot_ , boyo.”

 

            Blade’s expression didn’t change, but his jaw tightened and one hand curled into a fist. The way Ross had spoken to her, acted towards her... there was more here than he knew about. Could she have someone else? If so, why had she been alone that Friday? Because Ross was at work?

 

            He was horribly conscious that he was losing her, even more finally than he had when he’d stepped through that anomaly. With every moment that passed, however vivid they seemed now, his memories of Lorraine would fade like old photographs, memories that now simply didn’t exist. Until now, she had seemed almost exactly like the woman he had known. What else had he missed? What else had he simply refused to see, because it didn’t tally with what he had known, because he wanted to believe that it was not there?

 

***

 

            Lorraine turned a corner, went through a fire door and came out onto a path around a large, flat area of unkempt grass in front of the ARC, presumably some kind of decorative lawn. Captain Ross was standing in the middle of it, looking angry. She squared her shoulders and walked over towards him.

 

            “What were you _thinking_?” he said harshly, facing her with anger in his shrewd black eyes.

 

            She raised her eyebrows. “On which occasion?”

 

            “You know what I mean,” Ross snapped. “Letting a man you knew was ruthless even for a trained killer follow you, and failing to mention it the moment you got to people who could help you?”

 

            “You think I could have distracted Lieutenant Dawson from his punchbag?” Lorraine asked levelly.

 

            Captain Ross’s shoulders slumped slightly. “Probably not by any means other than shouting at him, no. And yes, if Richards had meant to kill you, he could easily have done it earlier. But – fuck it, Lorraine, I’m supposed to look after you, and you’re not making it easy for me.”

 

            “I know,” she said, and sighed. “I’m sorry, Adam. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Niall Richards.”

 

            He went very still. “ _What_?” he said, deceptively softly.

 

            “After you told me there was someone in the ARC detachment of soldiers you were worried about, I went home, and my downstairs neighbour told me someone had come to the door, asking for a woman called Jacinth,” Lorraine admitted. “He described this... someone... _very_ vividly, but had no personal details about them, and he didn’t realise that Jacinth is my sister’s name.”

 

            “That’s not a common name,” Ross commented, sticking his hands in his pockets.

 

            Lorraine shook her head. “It isn’t. And then on my Friday off, I went to a café near my house where I often eat, and this man turned up there. I recognised him from the description almost as soon as I saw him, but I didn’t have time to leave before he got to the café. It was crowded. He asked if he could share my table. I couldn’t see any weapons on him, and he seemed...”

 

            “If your next word is ‘friendly’,” Ross said, “I will confine you to your office for your own safety.”

 

            Lorraine half-smiled. “No. I was going to say no, but he... It was as if... When he saw I was going to say no, for one second he looked absolutely destroyed.” She shook her head. “I know I still shouldn’t have done it, but I was curious, and he caught me off-guard. We spoke, a little. The kind of conversation you have with a stranger. He told me his name was Niall. I only knew for certain it was the same man that you had warned me about when you gave me the name Niall Richards.”

 

            Ross dropped his head into his hands and groaned. “You don’t believe in making life easy for me, do you, Lorraine?”

 

            “No. I’m sorry.” Tentatively, she rested a hand on his shoulder and he breathed out in one long sigh. She could feel him relax under the touch, but she felt tenser: uncertain, unsure, as if she wasn’t totally comfortable with what she was doing, but this was Ross, this was _Adam_. She knew him. She wasn’t uncomfortable around him. Not in the slightest. Never had been, not even at first, when she was normally unsure around people. “I don’t _think_ he’s out for my blood. He could have killed me so many times over by now, but he hasn’t laid a finger on me. But I’ll be careful, now that I know what to look for.”

 

            “Yes.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Yes. That would be... a very good idea.”

 

            A flicker of movement in their peripheral vision caught both of their respective sets of eyes and they turned sharply, hands flying to weapons, but it was just Private Chakrabati. Lorraine let out a breath and relaxed as he came running up to them and saluted. “Sir! Captain Wilder says there’s an anomaly and Miss Johnson wants your team on it.”

 

            “Hell,” Ross said with feeling. “Get back and kit out, Chakrabati. I’ll be through asap.” Chakrabati nodded, saluted, and then ran back into the ARC. Ross turned quickly to Lorraine. “Miss Wickes, look, be careful. Watch Richards. I don’t think he’ll stop at following you to your house and I don’t know what he wants. And you’re in hostile territory. Just- be careful. We’ll discuss this when I get back. I won’t have you stalked and murdered on my watch.”

 

            “I’m glad to hear it,” Lorraine said dryly.

 

            Ross half-laughed, and then suddenly darted forward, cupping the back of her neck with one calloused hand and kissing her quickly, hard and fast and such a shock that Lorraine could only stand there blinking for several seconds. “In case,” he said gruffly, and turned and followed Chakrabati back into the ARC.

 

            Lorraine stood there, rock-still, for some time after he had gone. One of her hands had gone to her mouth, touching her lips as if looking for some kind of sign that that had really happened, and a small furrow worked its way between her brows as she frowned.

 

            ‘In case’? In case of what? Did he think he was going to die? Lorraine shook her head, bemused and disturbed. Random anomalies were dangerous, but nothing like the dystopian future on the other side of Christine’s pet controlled anomaly; they were practically routine. Why should Ross die on such an ordinary mission?

 

            Lorraine focussed on those two words, turning them over and over in her mind and searching for possibilities as she made her way back to the ARC. It helped her to ignore something that disturbed her even more.

 

            Ross had kissed her, yes. But Lorraine hadn’t felt a thing. And when she had stood there, seeing Ross race back into the ARC, she had not been thinking of him.

 

***

 

            After Captain Ross had gone, Lorraine went inside, and made her way to a very specific room which looked nondescript, but was actually one of the biggest possible threats to the ARC’s security; if a journalist somehow got access to anything kept here, it would be the end of the ARC’s cover. Lorraine paused a moment, racking her brains for the security code Captain Becker had not been entirely happy to give her, and then punched it in. A light on the pad turned green, and the door slid aside smoothly; Lorraine stepped inside.

 

            The room was lined, floor to ceiling, with tall steel racks containing hundreds of box files and combination-locked safes - and it wasn’t a small room, either. Most of these racks would be empty, waiting for new reports on new anomalies, new breakthroughs, new personnel documentation: the ARC had been designed to last as an institution, and it needed somewhere secure to keep the concrete details of its inner workings. Sooner or later, every piece of paperwork that passed through this building ended up here. Claire had been very clear about that, perhaps because it made so much work for her.

 

            Lorraine made the rounds of the room, turning the wheel on each rack until it rolled smoothly away from the others and she could examine its contents, till she found the personnel files and came to seven heavy box files related to the military personnel. She opened the sixth, which was labelled R-T, and picked out the slim folder that said RICHARDS, NIALL, CPL. Technically speaking, she probably shouldn’t remove it from the room, but she worked for Christine and she was armed. Who would tell her no today? And she was probably going to end up working here, anyway, if Christine deigned to change her workplace. She could put it back at any time, and she certainly didn’t intend to steal it. Comb it for revealing information, perhaps, and photocopy anything relevant. Steal, never.

 

            She shut the cabinet and left the room, hearing the door hiss shut behind her, and walked back up to the office she nominally shared with Claire, although the woman was such a nervous wreck Lorraine was strongly tempted to suggest she went and had a lie-down in one of the bunk-rooms, or perhaps took the rest of the day off. She also kept staring at Lorraine as if she was some kind of monstrous demon, as did a small but significant number of the rest of the ARC’s staff. Lorraine was pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that she was working for Christine, who was undoubtedly a monstrous demon, but it often felt like there was some kind of deeper cause.

 

            Banishing these thoughts, Lorraine sat down at the desk brought up for her so hurriedly, set down the cup of coffee she’d collected on her way up, and opened the file. Claire was sitting at her own desk, vibrating with nervousness; Lorraine glanced up at her and gave her a quick smile, before sipping her coffee and glancing down at the file. It started with a mugshot that made Lorraine understand why Ross worried about Niall Richards so much: he was staring flatly into the camera, direct, stern, emotionless, and yes, clinical. It continued with brief vital statistics and a CV, facts and dates that Lorraine ran her eye down and did her best to commit to memory, and then moved on to a full security briefing, some of which gave information which Lorraine wasn’t comfortable reading, such as a brusque description of his early childhood that left far too much room for pity and a certain amount of in-depth discussion of his psychological state. Lorraine gritted her teeth and attempted to expunge sympathy from her mind; she was _meant_ to be attempting a cool assessment of the facts. He had no criminal record, had clearly kept his nose clean, but almost every single submission in the file showed a wariness of him that ran deeper than rationality, into predator-prey instincts buried long ago. Lorraine frowned, and tapped a fingernail against her teeth, making Claire jump nervously. So why wasn’t she afraid of him? What was she missing that everyone else saw? Had she allowed herself to develop an emotional entanglement on the basis of exactly two meetings? If she had, it said appalling things for her professionalism. She had assumed that working for Christine would have shot her moral compass all to hell, but she hadn’t expected that her emotional detachment would be impaired. That was frankly dangerous, after all.

 

            She read carefully through the records of his time at the ARC, brief reports of his attendance at anomalies, some typed, some in his own spiky, semi-illegible handwriting, filled-out forms attesting to injuries received, and... Ah.

 

            Lorraine’s breath froze in her throat and she swallowed compulsively. She didn’t know why she was so surprised to see what she had just read; after all, she had been looking for something of the kind. But there was something so much more definite, concrete and ultimately disturbing about seeing it on paper in (she checked the signature and printed name at the bottom of the report) Captain Becker’s words.

 

            The report was dated some weeks previously, and was not titled. It wasn’t quite as concise as Richards’ own reports, but the captain didn’t waste words, describing in spare prose the reappearance of three of his men, including Richards, through what had appeared to be a routine and successfully contained anomaly. All three men then manifested what seemed at first like remarkably consistent hallucinations similar to those suffered by Professor Cutter, except that they believed that a woman by the name of Lorraine Wickes ought to have been present in the Anomaly Research Centre, employed as James Lester’s personal assistant.

 

Lorraine swallowed hard, and shot a look at Claire, who was hunched over her computer as if she expected Lorraine to bite her, and, well, _now Lorraine knew why_. She kept reading, skimming the words rapidly. ‘These beliefs remained doubtful until confirmed by, first, a photograph of the woman in question that Corporal Richards produced, and, second, Mr Lester’s arrival on the scene and comment that he had met a woman called Lorraine that morning in Christine Johnson’s employment. His sighting matched almost exactly the photograph, with superficial differences only. The new avenues in research this opens up, Professor Cutter having previously been believed to be delusional, have been passed over to the Physics department for further consideration. It is not thought that other changes to the timeline have taken place. All three men have been vetted extensively and are believed to be fit and healthy, but I believe that Corporal Richards should be closely watched. He seems to have been very close to the Lorraine Wickes he remembers and is suffering a certain amount of emotional distress...’

 

            Lorraine set the file gently down, flipping it shut. She did not bother to read the medical report; she had a reasonable idea of what it would say. Emotional distress? This required thought. Another Lorraine Wickes? Another timeline? Who _was_ she? Today was throwing up too many questions, and she hated it.

 

            She heard a clattering from inside the atrium and rose to her feet, instinctively checking the gun in her shoulder holster. She had been sitting still for hours; her coffee had grown cold.

 

            Stepping outside onto the ramp, Lorraine felt her heart go much colder than her coffee, and her hands closed hard on the metal banister – for a few moments, she even felt as if she might fall. She could see Captain Becker, some of the soldiers who had been sent with him to capture the missing scientific team, and the ARC’s ragtag, sullen scientific team down there, but no Captain Ross, and none of his men.

 

            In the next few minutes, she found it hard to care about the Minister’s volte-face, or Christine’s fury – it was her own foolish fault, anyway, she never could learn to mind her tongue – or even her impending identity crisis. She felt only the slightest twinge of spiteful pleasure that she’d been right about Captain Becker, and Christine had been too pleased with herself and too confident in her powers of coercion to see beyond the pretty face, bland eyes and flattery. She followed Christine out of the building, back to the cars, but purposefully dawdled until Christine had gone around a corner ahead and grabbed Becker’s sleeve. “Captain Ross?” she demanded, her voice hard and brittle. “Alive or dead?”

 

            Sympathy flashed in Captain Becker’s brown eyes. “Dead, miss. I’m sorry. Drove over a landmine, poor bastard.”

 

            Lorraine took a deep inward breath, thanked him mechanically, and hurried ahead to join Christine, who hadn’t even noticed that she’d been gone. She slipped into the front seat of the car, obligingly cranking her seat too far forward so Christine could sit comfortably, and stared blankly out of the windscreen as they drove away from the ARC. Captain Ross, dead; Niall Richards, alive; herself, faced with a hundred question-marks over her life and identity. She leant her head back against the headrest and shut her eyes, mind whirling with questions she could not banish.

 

            She would be glad when today was over.

 

***

 

            “Who used the last of the bloody _milk_?” Finn said, straightened up from examining the lower reaches of the fridge, hit his head on an open cupboard door, and swore.

 

            “Jenkins did,” Blade said indifferently, drinking black coffee. “And you can’t hold it against him, because he still has four stitches in his head and he doesn’t know if it’s arsehole or breakfast time.”

 

            Finn looked depressed.

 

            Blade rolled his eyes. “I’m going out for a run. I’ll buy some on the way back.”

 

            “Thanks, mate,” Finn said, and put water in his cornflakes. Blade eyed the resulting mess with distaste, but forbore from commenting, instead tucking his house keys, Oyster card and change into his pockets and going out into the hall.

 

            “Blade? Going out?”

 

            Blade looked up sharply, and saw Matt leaning over the banisters. He’d got his hair cut the previous evening, viciously short so that it wouldn’t grow so long so fast again, and looked strangely young. “Yeah,” Blade said, voice guarded. He had not got over Matt’s behaviour about Lorraine, and had no special intention of doing so; only the fact that Ross was still mostly out of it and Finn’s deliberate failure to notice that anything was wrong were preventing the atmosphere from becoming poisonous.

 

            Matt sighed, and scrubbed his hands over his face and through his newly cropped hair. “Look, Niall.”

 

            The use of his given name meant business. Blade folded his arms and waited.

 

            “I’m sorry. About before. I understand, now I’ve seen her. Or I think I do. I mean... she’s strong, and she’s clever. She wasn’t scared to act when she saw that bastard putting the boot into Finn - speaking of which, have you seen him take his tablets this morning?”

 

Blade shook his head, and Matt inhaled strongly. “If he’s hidden them again I won’t be answerable for my actions. Anyway, she’s not your type, but she’s the type not to be afraid of you, or to stand up to you even if she is, which none of your other girlfriends ever has been. I can see... how she’d be good for you, I guess? A thinker.”

 

“Get to the point,” Blade ordered.

 

Matt sighed. “I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed she was like all the others.”

 

Blade raised an eyebrow. “I’m sorry? Who?”

 

Matt’s eyes bugged out in the celebrated what-more-do-you-want-from-me expression common to the ARC’s medics. Ross had speculated that the four of them got together with a mirror and practised it. “Lorraine.”   

 

Blade nodded. “Fine. Thanks.”

 

“Glad to hear it,” Matt muttered. A subterranean noise came from the door next to him, and he raised his voice. “Go back to sleep, Ross! For God’s sake, if you or Finn ever get MRSA I’m leaving you to the NHS’s tender mercies. Zombies wandering around the house, walking into doors and finishing off the milk? Once is enough, thank you very much. See you later.”

 

Blade grinned, and left to catch the Tube to Putney.


	7. Chapter 7

 

 

He jogged around the corner into Lime Gardens Square and made deliberately for the enclosed garden, taking his keys out of his pocket. Only weeks before he’d stepped through the anomaly, Lorraine had given him a set of her keys and he’d put them on the key ring with his house keys, so as to have them handy. This included a key for the square’s garden, and unless they’d changed the locks, Blade wouldn’t so much as have to pick the lock. Surveillance made easy.

 

The lock clicked easily, and the black iron gate swung open; Blade shut it behind him and crossed the grass, choosing a bench to sit down on. From here, he could see Lorraine’s front door, but an overgrown bush behind the bench made him difficult to see from the road and a tree shading the bench mostly obscured him from Lorraine’s windows. He settled down, stretching out his legs and tipping his head back, squinting at the glints of sun through the leaves. What he was doing was so risky it was ridiculous, going too close to a mark who knew of his existence, who was likely to be armed, and who had no reason not to fear him and act promptly and sensibly on that fear? Ryan would have skinned him alive if he knew. Fiver would probably fly back from Afghanistan for the occasion if he got wind of it. Matt would have _fits_ at the very idea.

 

            Blade found he didn’t care. He was throwing every hard lesson he’d ever learnt to the wind, acting on a hunch, not knowing whether there’d be any pay-off. She probably wouldn’t even notice he was there, and if she did she might not come down, or she might call the police. It didn’t matter - the small chance that she would come down and he’d see her was enough for him. He had thought that he missed her before, when he hadn’t seen her for weeks, but trailing her through the ARC, watching her teach that bastard Dawson a lesson, even staring Captain Ross in the face and knowing for certain that on some level – whether he thought he feared for Lorraine’s safety or not - the man recognised a rival in him, that had set something alight. He needed to see her again, like a junkie falling off the wagon and hooked once more by that sweet, lethal rush, and yet he knew he had to try to keep back - the last thing he wanted was to frighten her. Thinking about his attitude, it seemed to him that he was likely to scare the bejesus out of any sensible woman behaving like that, and Lorraine was eminently sensible. 

 

            Blade waited, wondering if he was doing something wrong, as opposed to just doing something stupid, and was surprised when the big black door of the old rectory opened, and Lorraine stepped out, moving quickly down the road without appearing to notice Blade. She had her eyes downcast, and was wearing a blue shirt-dress Blade recognised; it was too thin for the weather, and she had a brown, thick-knit cardigan draped over her arms, which were folded across her chest.  Then, suddenly, she stopped and walked across the road, pushed the latch on the enclosed garden gate, and crossed the grass, heading straight for him. For lack of other options, he stayed where he was.

 

            In moments she had reached him, and was standing directly in front of him, a couple of metres away. “Hello,” she said quietly, and let the cardigan she was holding fall to one side, revealing that she had got over her aversion to keeping guns in the house.

 

            Blade breathed carefully. He was still fairly certain that Lorraine didn’t have it in her to kill in cold blood, but if he panicked her at all she would not hesitate to shoot him; it was another reminder that this woman was not quite the Lorraine he had known.

 

            “You and I need to have a word,” Lorraine said matter-of-factly. “Items on the agenda include coming to my house, tailing me through London, shadowing me through the ARC and also dating some kind of doppelganger of me _don’t move or I will shoot_.”

 

            Blade froze, and sank back into the bench, heart racing. “How?” he said roughly, forcing air through his throat.

 

            Lorraine raised one eyebrow, and the familiarity of the expression made him feel like his heart was caving in. “I read your file. Christine’s three-hour occupation of the ARC was good for something.”

 

            He blinked and spoke, voice curiously detached, feeling like it didn’t belong to him. “You would...”

 

            She peered at him. “I wonder if this is what Captain Becker meant when he said emotional distress? Put your head between your knees, you’ve turned grey.”

 

            Blade shook his head. “’M fine.”

 

            Lorraine’s nostrils flared. “Whatever you say. Get up, then.”

 

            He stood, and she took two steps back and flipped the cardigan back over the gun. “Here’s what’s going to happen next,” she informed him, clear and cool, but he could see flickering uncertainty at the back of her eyes and felt a moment of spiteful pleasure that he knew it was there, but Ross probably would never have known even to look for it. “You’re going to get up and we’re going to go up to my flat. If we see anyone I know, I am going to introduce you, like we’re friends. If you try anything, I’ll shoot you. Do you understand?”

 

            “Yes,” he said. His mind had gone blank. He couldn’t look away from her. He itched to reach out for her, and burned with keeping back, because he knew he would frighten her, not because he cared right now if she shot him or not, but because the last thing he ever wanted was to frighten her and he knew – he had always known - it would be so easily done. He would only have to lose control for a few seconds, at the most, and he’d have lost her.

 

            He walked with her to the building, unlocked the door when she silently handed him her own keys, and preceded her up the stairs to her flat, careful to stay only just ahead of her; the last thing he wanted was to jolt her by seeming to make a break for it. He could feel the bright thrill of adrenaline, and knew he was risking his life. He also knew it was worth it.

 

            When he’d unlocked the flat’s door, he turned to her and dropped the keys into her open palm.

 

            “Thank you,” Lorraine said calmly, and gestured at the door.

 

Blade went inside and glanced quickly around the flat, looking for differences. He found only a few: slightly different curtains, one wall wallpapered in a massive, bold print rather than painted, different, less comfortable-looking, more stylish sofas, a clock with a steel face – it looked like Lorraine had paid slightly more attention to the interior décor than she had in the timeline he remembered, where she had mostly just made sure the walls were the colours she wanted them and nothing clashed and left it at that. The colour scheme was the same, and so was the flat’s layout, as far as he could tell. He could even see similar books and piles of newspapers on the coffee table, and the TV was the same make.

 

Lorraine draped her cardigan over the back of a chair, slipped on a black shoulder holster that had been lying on the kitchen island, and put the Glock carefully in it. “Tea?” she asked. “Coffee?”

 

“Tea, please,” he said, trying to stay composed. It was a remarkably Lorraine thing to do, offer what must look to her like a stalker _coffee_. In fact, if he was totally honest with himself, he _had_ been sort of stalking her; the thought gave him a twinge of helpless guilt, because he’d probably frightened her. She had seemed okay during that conversation at the café, and he was pretty sure that she’d stepped in to prevent Captain Ross from giving him the third degree, but still, he’d been following her around – at intervals, but still, following her around. He knew where she lived, for Christ’s sake, that would put the wind up anyone, and Lorraine had always been very security-conscious.

 

She put the kettle on, and gestured at the kitchen island. “Sit down,” she ordered, and he pulled out one of the high chairs that surrounded it and sat down, watching her get down mugs and a box of teabags, all without turning her back on him. He made sure to keep his hands flat on the table in front of him, where she could see them, and saw a tiny quirk at the corner of her mouth that said she appreciated the gesture.

 

            Eventually, she had finished making tea – only breaking her silence to ask him whether he wanted milk and sugar – and put a mug before him, taking a seat opposite him with her own mug on the table in front of her. She took the Glock out of the holster, unloaded it, and laid both gun and bullets neatly down on the table, folding her hands tidily and resting them on the surface, then meeting his eyes calmly.

 

            Blade tried not to stare in shock. “I thought...” he began, and then trailed off.

 

            “You thought I thought you were a danger to me?” Lorraine guessed.

 

            He nodded, feeling the weight of the knives against his skin suddenly heavy. He could hurt her so easily, and now she was unarmed, and she didn’t know him – and she was careful, he knew she was, even more so than the Lorraine he had known - so why was she doing this? Why did she trust him?

 

            Lorraine’s lips curved, and she looked down at her tea and then back up at him, still smiling that tiny smile. “I don’t know what you are to me, but I do know that you’ve been to my building, if not inside, at least once, you’ve followed me around my place of work, and you’ve tracked me down to a café I frequent. You could have killed me any number of times, but you haven’t. Why would you do it now?”

 

            “I could be a psycho trying to win your trust before killing you?” Blade suggested slowly.

 

            Lorraine pressed her lips together and her eyes sparkled, like she was trying not to laugh. “I’ve read your file,” she said.

 

            Blade stared at her. “Oh. Yeah,” he said, rather weakly.

 

            Lorraine nodded. “Christine’s three-hour occupation of the ARC was good for something. So I know that you might be psychotic, but a, you think in straight lines and if you wanted to kill me you would have done it by now, and b, you don’t want to kill me.” She looked at him carefully, examining him. “I’m not sure you could kill me. I’m the wrong person.”

 

            “Cut the crap,” he said roughly. This was too much; she was dancing around the issue and it hurt more than if she’d attacked it directly.

 

            She looked reproving and slightly angry. “Do you think it’s _easy_ for me to say out loud that I’m a replacement for a woman who never lived?”

 

            “What do you think it feels like looking at you and knowing you aren’t _my_ Lorraine?” he shot back, infuriated.

 

            “Do you think I wanted this?” Lorraine snapped, and took a deep breath. “This is getting out of hand. Sorry.”  


            He nodded sharply and settled down, watching her sullenly with his hands wrapped around his coffee mug.

 

            She took a gulp of coffee, shut her eyes and opened them again. “So. You were on one side of an anomaly, and there was another me, and you loved her. Then you were on the other side of the same anomaly. Then you went back through the same anomaly and there was this me, and I didn’t even know you. Are we absolutely clear on this point, because I am _not_ enjoying revisiting it?”

 

            “Yes,” Blade said.

 

            “Good,” Lorraine said with relief. “Now. The first I knew of you was when you came to my building a few weeks ago, and my neighbour saw you.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “You made an impression,” she added pointedly.

 

            Blade sat completely still for a minute, thinking through the implications of this. “Mikey is...”

 

            “Yes?” Lorraine prompted, eyes glittering with amusement again. 

 

            “... Still not my type,” Blade concluded awkwardly.

 

            Lorraine bit her lip and smiled. “Moving on. I saw you again at the café, and then in the ARC, we both know how that went. But I was also getting a series of oblique warnings from Ad- Captain Ross – apparently your reputation precedes you.”

 

            Blade vanished into his tea. The bit about having a reputation was nothing new, but there was Captain Ross again. Bastard. “Were you two... together?” he asked when he’d ingested enough caffeine to control himself.

 

            Lorraine blushed slightly and narrowed her eyes at him. “No. We might have been one day. But the answer to your question is no.”

 

            “Good,” Blade said without thinking about it, and of course, Lorraine pounced.

 

            “Good?” she demanded, face taking on the mildest version of the pissed-off look Lorraine had worn when he had accidentally let something too possessive slip. It was pretty much the embodiment of the words ‘you don’t own me’, but at this stage he could generally fix it and not find her going back to her own flat in twenty minutes or banishing him to Hammersmith to teach him a lesson.

 

            Unfortunately, he failed to. “He wasn’t good enough for you.” This was just getting worse and worse...  


            The You Don’t Own Me look ratcheted up a couple of notches. “Who is, then?”

 

            “No-one,” Blade said, realising that having dug this hole for himself he might as well dig a little further and say what he thought.

 

            Lorraine stopped looking pissed off and started looking stunned.

 

            “You know that, right?” Blade asked awkwardly.

 

            Lorraine gave him a funny look, composure and scepticism restored. “You’re not helping me think you aren’t delusional. I think it would be best if we went back to the original subject and you told me everything.”  


            Blade grabbed at the reprieve from the now distinctly uncomfortable atmosphere, and began. He started from walking through the anomaly that had separated him from his Lorraine, and explained everything that had happened up to the moment that this Lorraine had walked up to him in the garden with a gun trained on him, taking care to tell her the whole truth: he knew she would settle for nothing less. She listened silently, and maybe Miss Johnson or Captain Ross would have thought she wasn’t reacting, but he could see tension in her jawline, and her eyes might be fixed on his but the wooden expression in them suggested she was fighting to hide emotion.

 

            “That’s all,” he concluded. “I’m sorry, L- Miss Wickes...”

 

            There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and then Lorraine shifted and spoke. “Tell me about her. The other me. Was she much like me? What did she do differently?”

 

            “You look exactly like her,” he said. “Except she had a different haircut.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket, saying “I’m not going for a weapon,” and took out the photograph of her he kept, which he laid in front of the Glock. The paper was soft at the edges from handling and one corner was dog-eared. She picked it up carefully and examined it.

 

            “You took this?” she asked, and he nodded.

 

            She nodded in return, and handed the photograph back. “Where was it taken?”

 

            “Her sister’s house,” he said. “About a minute after it was taken her niece jumped on her and made her play Scrabble.”

 

            Lorraine smiled slightly. “What’s her niece’s name?”  


            “Adele,” he answered, knowing he was being interrogated – subtly and politely, but still interrogated.

 

            She took a gulp of her tea, and nodded slightly, before looking up at him again. “Tell me about the differences. Can you tell where our lives changed? What the difference between the timelines is?”

 

            Blade looked at her, startled, and then remembered she worked for an outfit that handled anomalies too; of course she’d have thought this through in those terms. Luckily, he’d thought this through a lot, too. “I think... she came from MI5. Lester poached her from the ARC’s liaison. She wasn’t happy there. Your boss comes from MI6, so I reckoned maybe you did too?”

 

            Lorraine nodded, eyes intent on the middle distance – she was thinking hard. “Christine hand-picked me for her outfit. Did the other me tell you how she was recruited?”

 

            Blade frowned, stretching his memory. “Yeah, I think so. She said... she answered an advert in the newspaper.”

 

            Lorraine was frowning now. “Could it have been the _Times_?”

 

            “Easily,” Blade confirmed. “She used to read the _Financial Times_ sometimes as well, and the _Economist_ if she could, but always the _Times_. She was usually swimming in newspapers.”

 

            Lorraine chuckled. “Have a look at my coffee table.”

 

            He looked over his shoulder, and caught sight of the haphazard pile of newspapers he’d noticed as he came in: the _Times_ in considerable disarray, the _Economist_ about to fall off the edge of the table and the unmistakable pink paper of the _Financial Times_ buried under the lot. He grinned. “Okay, that hasn’t changed.”

 

            Lorraine allowed herself an answering grin, and then said in a business-like voice: “I was recruited by replying to an advert in the _Times_ after getting bored in the Home Office. Does that match with the other me?”

 

            He considered it for a moment. “Not quite,” he said slowly. “Lorr- she... never said she was bored. Sometimes she’d say she was tired, but that could be anything – boredom, feeling sick, PTSD playing up, actually being tired... it was just what she said when she didn’t feel great and wanted looking after a bit. I don’t know if she worked for the Home Office, but if it bored her, she wouldn’t have admitted it, because she saw... whatever she was doing, she was doing it because she thought it was important, so she wouldn’t complain. She had a great poker face, it was always difficult to tell what she was thinking, and she never liked to say... You’re like her, that way. I think.”

 

            Lorraine smiled briefly. “PTSD?”

 

            He grimaced involuntarily, remembering all the interrupted nights, seeing terror on her face and not being able to stop it, and biting anxiety about whether he was enough to help her. “Not diagnosed. I just think that’s what it is. A year or so ago, there was an attack on the ARC, involving a man called Oliver Leek and future predators. Do you know about that?”

 

            Lorraine nodded.

 

            “She was in the building when it happened. She wasn’t hurt – she was armed and she ran the right way – but she has – she had fucking awful nightmares, and just mentioning it scared her. And she had a thing where if lights were flickering, she had to turn them off and change the bulb immediately. She never got counselling. She never told anyone except me. I think her family knew, but not because she told them.” Blade ran a hand over his short black hair, and shrugged, eyes fixed on the grain of the kitchen island. “Yeah.”

 

            “At least she had you,” Lorraine pointed out. “You really loved her, didn’t you? And she knew it?”

 

            He nodded, without tearing his eyes from the work surface, and set his jaw.

 

            “You still do,” Lorraine deduced, and then said more hesitantly, “You don’t...? I’m not her...”

 

            “I know,” he said, and glanced up at her briefly, before looking intently down at the work surface again. “I know you’re different. I can... see it now. You walk a little differently. You’re more confident. Less afraid to keep the boundaries you set. She was... getting to be like you. Just a bit more... obviously assertive. You even carry a different gun. I’d try a Sig Sauer P228, see what it gets you...  You’re not the same. I know that.”

 

He admitted to himself that he wished she was; that none of this had happened, that he was back in his own timeline. This Lorraine was a different woman – interesting in her own way, with the same courage, perception and intelligence, more belief in herself and more openness, but also, he suspected, a less unbending moral code and less of a tendency to extend her compassion to all humanity. She was interesting, yes, and she was still hot as hell, and he would be lying if he said that under the emotional mess of his feelings about her, he wasn’t strongly attracted to her, but she wasn’t... his.

 

            His Lorraine would have smacked him if he’d said that out loud.

 

            There was a long silence, and then Lorraine said softly: “Is it okay if I touch your hand?”

 

            He nodded, and felt her smaller hands slip round one of his. It lacked the gun calluses his Lorraine had had; she practised less. But her hands were warm and strong and almost exactly as he remembered them, and it hurt, maybe even more because they weren’t quite as he remembered. The same, but different. He chewed the inside of his cheek.

 

            “Someone,” Lorraine said quietly, rubbing her thumb over his palm, “has fucked both of us over good and proper.”

 

            His head shot up, and he felt his eyes go wide. “That’s another thing she never did - swear.”

 

            Lorraine just smiled mischievously. “Didn’t she? She was missing out. My point stands. This is too specific a change for it to have been an accident, not if you were messing around in prehistory.” Suddenly, her phone went, and she grabbed it and scanned the screen. “Damn. Work.” She looked up, formal again, and gestured at the door. “You’d better go.”

 

            He nodded hastily, threw back the last of his tea, got up and went to the door. She was texting, not looking at him, but he turned back anyway, and said: “I’m sorry about Captain Ross.”

 

            She looked up at him for one clear moment, and then her eyes fell. “Thanks,” she murmured, and he could see her bite her lower lip, staring at the screen of her phone.

 

            He took his cue, and went.


	8. Chapter 8

            “Captain Wilder,” Lorraine said crisply. “A word?”

 

            Captain Wilder tore himself away from his paperwork and looked warily at her. “This isn’t going to be about that report that’s due in in-“

 

            “Fifteen minutes?” Lorraine finished. “No, because I know you’ve done it.”

 

            Captain Wilder looked as surprised as he ever did.

 

She pointed at his desk, almost apologetically. “You’ve printed it off and I can read upside-down.”

 

Captain Wilder shook his head at her. “You’re unnerving, miss.”

 

“Thank you,” Lorraine said dryly. “Pleased to hear it. I wanted your help on the matter of some further firearms training.”

 

Captain Wilder gave her the kind of stare he generally reserved for the state of the fridge in the tiny office kitchen. “Miss Wickes, I was under the impression that you _hated_ firearms training.”

 

“I didn’t hate it,” Lorraine said.

 

Captain Wilder looked simultaneously jaundiced and sceptical.

 

Lorraine inhaled strongly, and began to look seriously annoyed. “Someone suggested that I should try a different kind of handgun, and you know I’ve never been comfortable with the fit of the Glock in my hand.”

 

Captain Wilder flipped a thoroughly chewed biro back and forth in his fingers. “Adam taught you on the Glock,” he commented.

 

Lorraine treated him to a thoroughly nasty glare. “Yes, _and_?”

 

Uncertainly, Captain Wilder leaned back in his chair; he didn’t usually show much expression, being mostly neutral, professional and as weatherbeaten and expressionless as a standing stone, but now he looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Miss Wickes... are you all right? You and Adam...”

 

“We were friends,” Lorraine bit out. “It might have been more, but he _died_.”

 

“Yes,” Captain Wilder said. His voice had gone stiff and drained of personality. “If you ever want to talk to someone...”

 

“ _I will ring the_ _Samaritans_ ,” Lorraine said, slow, soft and dripping with barely-controlled anger. “Because you would rather have your nails ripped out with red-hot tongs. You know that. I know that. _Dottie the cleaning lady_ probably knows that. Captain Wilder, will you _please_ just come down to the armoury and show me which _sodding_ gun is a Sig Sauer P228?”

 

            There was a long silence. “Fine,” Captain Wilder said gruffly, admitting defeat, and got up, marching out of the door. Lorraine followed him, still simmering, and thanked him curtly when he searched through the massed ranks of steel lockers and handed her the handgun she was looking for.

 

            She turned it over carefully in her fingers and gripped it, trying it in her hands, and Captain Wilder saw her face freeze. “Do you want to try it?” he asked.

 

            Lorraine nodded silently, and he signed out ammunition for her and yellow safety goggles and ear-protectors for the both of them, and they went on to the firing range. Captain Wilder stood well back and watched as Lorraine took up her stance – it was slightly off; on any other day he would have corrected her – breathed slowly for a few moments, and then began to fire, aiming precisely, trying to get the measure of the different weapon.

 

            Captain Wilder felt something cold at the base of his spine, cruel icy fingers sliding up to grip the back of his neck, sending goosebumps along his arms. He knew Miss Wickes’ capabilities. She wasn’t bad; she could be very good, but hated the idea of carrying a gun around with a passion and only did the bare minimum of practice. The Glock hadn’t really suited her, either, but there had never been time to try something new, see if there was something that fit her better.

 

            Whoever had picked out this for her had been absolutely dead on. He could see it in the way her grip was more natural and in the fact that, after she’d found her range, she had improved rapidly, beyond what she should have even if this exact model was perfect for her. It was fucking _creepy_. He shuddered.

 

            Abruptly, Lorraine came to the end of a round and stopped shooting, flipped the safety catch on and pushed the ear-protectors off her head, letting them fall to circle her neck. Captain Wilder craned his neck to see the expression on her face, and shuddered again, much against his will. “Are you done, miss?” he called.

 

            “Yes,” Lorraine said mechanically, the terrible blankness and fear still filling her eyes, and then suddenly she blinked hard and wiped her face clean of expression. “Fine, thank you. Can you sign this out for me, instead of the Glock? I’ll bring that down in just a second.”

 

            “Of course.” He held out his hand, and she handed it over to him just a little too quickly. “Are you sure?” he asked, on a whim.

 

            “No,” Lorraine said. “Do it anyway.” She hesitated. “I have a call to make.”

 

***

 

            The smoke alarm’s squawking was joined by a new noise and Blade swore, shoving all the kitchen windows open and stuffing Finn’s failed fried bacon butty into the sink, along with the frying pan it was glued to. “You’re cleaning that up, mate!” he yelled at Finn over the noise, who squinted at him from where he was standing in a corner where he couldn’t burn anything more and nodded woefully. Blade then cursed his way through the hall to the front door, going out to sit on the low wall in front of the house, where there was no noise or smoke. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, as it was currently going nuts, and took the call before whoever it was hung up. “Hello?” he demanded.

 

            There was a small, uncertain pause. “Hello?” a very familiar voice echoed, and Blade nearly fell off the wall. “Niall?”

 

            “Yeah,” he said hurriedly, “it’s me. _Lorraine_?”  

 

            “Yes.” She hesitated again. “I’m- I’m sorry. Is this a bad time?”

 

            “No,” Blade said quickly. “I’m off-duty now. Why?”

 

            “Um.” (Again, Blade tried very hard not to fall off the wall. ‘Um’ was not a vocalisation that came naturally to Lorraine Wickes on any side of any anomaly, ever). “You remember you suggested I try a different kind of handgun?”

 

            “Yes?” Blade said, restoring his balance. “Did it work?”

 

            “Did it _work_?” she repeated, and choked a laugh. “I beat my personal best and then some on a gun that I was new to, that I’d never even seen before, and the only difference I could see was that it felt comfortable in my hands! I terrified Captain Wilder.”

 

            “It’s what Captain Ryan taught the other you on,” Blade said quietly. “Major Ryan, now. And you were _very_ good.”

 

            Lorraine was silent. “I don’t like guns,” she said after a moment.

 

            “You never did. You knocked me right back when you threatened me with one in the park.”

 

            She half-laughed. “Did I? I thought I might have to use it, for a moment.” She said nothing for a long time, but Blade could hear her walking back and forward, pacing nervously, her shoes clicking on a hard floor. He waited for her to speak again.

 

            “This is real, isn’t it?” she said at last, and she sounded a little afraid. “This is... real, and I’m a fake.”

 

            “You’re not a fake,” he said quickly, remembering Jenny Lewis’ fingers twisting anxiously, angrily around her mobile phone after long days of being called Claudia Brown. “I am. I’m the outsider, the transplant. You’re real, you belong here.”

 

            “You were here first,” Lorraine said, and he knew she didn’t mean it to come out so close to a whisper. “And so was she. I didn’t mean-“

 

            “It’s not your fault,” Blade said, knowing what she was thinking, but running out of ways to articulate it, and cursing himself for being so fucking thick. “It’s not.”

 

            “I know,” she said, but he didn’t hear any confidence in it.

 

            “It’s not your fault,” he repeated uselessly, knowing that with the other Lorraine he could just have reached out and touched the back of her neck with the tips of his fingers and she’d have understood so much better, and much faster, too. “Look, where are you?”

 

            “At home,” Lorraine sighed. “Christine’s in a horrible mood and didn’t come to work this morning – she’s been out networking.”

 

            Blade nodded to himself and took ‘networking’ to mean ‘trying to restore her contacts’ and backers’ faith in her’. “Yeah?”

 

            “So I stayed at work long enough to tie up all the loose ends from that fiasco, move Christine’s appointments and see everything in order, and went home at four o’clock on the dot.”

 

            He could hear the satisfied smile in her voice and smiled reflexively. “Great. Wait a minute, I’m going to go inside.”

 

            “Where are you?” Lorraine enquired, sounding puzzled.

 

            “Sitting on the front wall,” Blade said. “Flatmate smoked out the kitchen. Hang on.”

 

            He went inside and up to his room, bypassing Ross, who looked knackered but more alert than he had done for weeks, and was currently having a spirited argument with Matt on the subject of his lunch, into which Matt was trying to introduce fruit and veg. Hopefully Lorraine couldn’t hear the lurid threats Matt was employing, which started at scurvy and went rapidly downhill.

 

            Eventually he got to his room, and shut and bolted the door behind him, collapsing onto his bed. “Okay. Are you sitting down?”

 

            “Yes,” Lorraine said suspiciously.

 

            “This isn’t the first time something like this has happened,” Blade told her.

 

            “ _What_?”

 

            “Yeah,” Blade said, kicking off his shoes and stretching his legs out, anticipating a long conversation. “Last time it was Jenny Lewis. One day Professor Cutter came back through an anomaly and called her Claudia Brown.”

 

            “ _Jenny Lew_ \- you mean that this has happened _before_? People have been – replaced _before_? And no-one has done a thing to stop it?” She sounded absolutely furious and he couldn’t blame her.

 

            “Well... no,” Blade admitted. “Everyone thought Professor Cutter was nuts. His ex-wife had just announced she’d cheated on him with his best friend, enough to knock anyone sideways a bit, and then Professor Cutter was always a bit odd.”

 

            “Helen Cutter and Stephen Hart,” Lorraine said instantly. “My _God_.”

 

            “You’re well-informed,” Blade said neutrally.

 

            “Hah,” Lorraine said bitterly. “I’m paid to be. And seriously, no-one thought to investigate this?”

 

            “No,” Blade said. “But there’s more evidence this time, so it is getting investigated. And the Physics department are having a complete field day.”

 

            “Hmm,” Lorraine said, and sighed. “This is ridiculous. From beginning to end, this is _ridiculous_.”

 

            “Yeah,” Blade said, playing absently with a knife. “Are you okay?”

 

            “Yes,” Lorraine said. “I think so. It’s just...” She sighed again. “It’s a shock, all right? Of all the things I could be sure of...”

 

            “The things you knew you understood,” he filled in, suddenly getting where she was coming from. “The things you relied on. They’re gone.”

 

            There was a pause, and then Lorraine said: “Yes. Exactly.” She paused for another moment, and then sighed. “Well... that’s that cleared up. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what Lester’s Physics people come up with. Talk to you later?”

 

            “Yeah, sure,” he said, reluctant to put down the phone and stop hearing her voice.

 

            “And- Niall? Thanks.”  

 

            “You’re welcome,” Blade said to the buzz that told him she’d put down the phone.

 

***

 

            Lorraine swiped her pass card, proceeded into the lobby of Christine’s headquarters and went upstairs to her office in a reasonably buoyant mood. Admittedly it was a Monday, and she wasn’t yet back on an even keel after discovering that Niall had been absolutely stone-cold right and she was a replacement for a woman who had never even had the chance to live, but a weekend spent watching old films and eating absurd amounts of ice-cream with Mikey had gone a long way to restore her belief in her own sanity. She hooked her coat on the back of her door, set her handbag down on her desk and booted up her computer, then went to make her first coffee of the morning. In the miniscule office kitchen, she found a nervy technician twitching over the kettle, and frowned slightly.

 

            Christine had only a skeleton civilian staff. She hired people to do one job and expected them to do at least three, which probably didn’t help Travis’s natural inclination to anxiety, but he’d been here for more than six months and anyone who couldn’t handle the pressure usually dropped out long before that. Lorraine had Travis earmarked as someone to keep an eye on for later, when she was running her own outfit and needed to call in a freelance. Or perhaps there was a job she ought to encourage him into, somewhere where the boss didn’t remind Travis of the terrifying headmistress at his primary school (and no, Travis almost certainly didn’t remember telling her that, let alone imagine that she knew). He was constantly worried, and it was doing him no good at all.

 

            Still. He looked unusually rattled for eight o’clock.

 

            Lorraine coughed tactfully and Travis successfully hit his head on a cupboard three feet from where he was standing. Lorraine winced in sympathy. “Travis?”

 

            “M-Miss Wickes,” Travis shuddered, shaking like an electrocuted fluffy bunny and looking roughly as piteous.           

 

            “Breathe,” Lorraine advised soothingly, finding a clean mug in the cupboard and sniffing the milk in the fridge suspiciously. “Breathe, count to ten, calm down and then tell me what happened.”

 

            Obediently, Travis took several deep breaths and counted audibly to ten before saying. “Um... Miss Johnson’s in a really bad mood?”

 

            Lorraine stood up sharply and hit her head on the open cupboard door. “Ow! _What_? Miss Johnson isn’t in!”

 

            “Yes she is,” Travis said. “Not in her office. Downstairs.”

 

            “ _Downstairs_?” Lorraine stared at Travis.

 

            “The interrogation room,” Travis confirmed. “I was working on the controlled anomaly, we’d been seeing increasing spikes peaking every six hours, starting two days ago, and it was getting to the point where we’d never seen such a strong anomaly, ever, and we wanted to see what it was going to do, so we all stayed in, waiting-“

 

            “Stop. Breathe. Continue,” Lorraine interrupted, boiling the kettle and reflecting that the world would be an easier place for a lot of people if someone taught them that nine times out of ten, Christine didn’t follow through on her threats because she simply didn’t think you were worth the trouble. She included herself in the group of people who were never sure if Christine was serious or not, but congratulated herself on not being knocked off course by Christine on a good day, unlike eighty percent of her non-military staff. It was the bad days that left her feeling unsure if she should expect poison in her coffee.

 

            Travis stopped and took a gulp of air. “-but _Miss Johnson_ came in at two a.m., and said she needed the anomaly, and Professor Dickinson said we needed the anomaly, too, and Miss Johnson shouted at him and then she had Captain Wilder hold a gun at his head while what looked like half a bloody battalion went through and half an hour later they came out with this... woman, and she was all struggling, but quietly, and Miss Johnson said to take her to the interrogation room and they went.” Tale of woe concluded, Travis breathed normally again, and stared hopelessly at Lorraine.

 

            “Hm,” Lorraine said unhelpfully but soothingly, and then the kettle whistled and she grabbed it, pouring it onto the instant coffee in her mug. “What sort of a woman? Describe her to me.”  


            Travis gave her another hopeless look, and Lorraine wished momentarily that Christine had hired her technicians for their common sense and observational skills as well as their sheer academic brilliance. She could really have done with Mikey’s gift for description as opposed to Travis’s grasp of complex electromagnetic theory right now. “Uh... quite young? Dark hair. Dark eyes. Wearing sort-of light khaki clothes... I was busy routing power to the shields, because I knew the anomaly was going to spike whatever Miss Johnson did, you can sort of see it... but there wasn’t enough power anyway.”

 

            Lorraine stopped stirring her coffee. “What? Not enough power?”

 

            Travis shook his head. “I was trying to access the auxiliary generator to power up the shields to maximum capability, but I didn’t have enough time, because you have to get everyone out of the controlled area first and they didn’t listen when I tried to get them to move. And the anomaly... spilled out.” He shrugged helplessly.

 

            “Spilled out,” Lorraine repeated slowly. “Does that happen often?”

 

            Travis shook his head. “This is the second time. We’re meant to avoid it at all costs. Miss Johnson shouted at me.” He shuddered.

 

            Lorraine began stirring again, spoon clinking sharply in the mug. Distantly, she noted the faded lettering: PUT DOWN THE COFFEE, AND NO-ONE GETS HURT. This felt wrong. There was a detail niggling at the back of her brain, an instinct tripped by something half-heard and less than half remembered... “Travis,” she heard herself say evenly. “You know I don’t know much about physics. What happens if an anomaly spills out of the controlled area?”

 

            “Not much,” Travis said, that blasé phrase in that blasé tone that was generally followed by something like ‘and UNIT didn’t notice the prehistoric mutant spider anyway’. Lorraine’s heart sank. “It tends to scramble computers a bit, but we have new casings and data back-ups on the control and analysis computers to stop that now. I’m afraid it screwed up the photocopier down the hall, though. And it can make you a bit amnesiac for a little while, and it does feel like the biggest brain-freeze ever, you know, like eating an ice-cream? You can see it, though, that’s really cool. It’s like a silver wave of broken glass or something, because it’s all pent-up and then it bursts out... And sometimes it messes up your vision a bit for a while, like the woman they pulled out of the anomaly, she looked a lot older for about half a second after the anomaly burst out.”

 

            “Fascinating,” Lorraine said, still distantly, her eyes fixed on the wall. She could understand why Christine was annoyed, but she couldn’t concentrate on dissecting that problem. There was too much information here, and none of it fitted together, and something was still getting at her, probably the tiniest of tiny details, maybe in a few minutes she’d remember something about the auxiliary generator being rerouted to cover the extra security hardware that they were supposed to be in the middle of installing... It was probably nothing serious, but it bothered her, and she was no less annoyed because none of what Travis was saying fitted together with what she already knew. For example, there was no reason for Christine to be in at two on a Monday morning, and for another, she knew nothing of the woman Travis was describing.

 

            She felt like someone had tipped a bucket of ice-cubes down her back. Was Christine _sidelining_ her? And if so, _why_? What had she got planned? Did she know about Niall?

 

            “Miss Wickes?” Travis said loudly, looking worried. “Are you all right?”

 

            “Fine,” Lorraine said, although she was anything but fine, and picked up her coffee. “I’ll look into it, Travis. But I’m sure Miss Johnson isn’t really angry with you.”

 

            “Did I say that?” Travis asked the empty air as Lorraine walked out, headed back to her office.

 

            The empty air didn’t answer. Neither did Lorraine.


	9. Chapter 9

            “Danny Quinn,” Lester said in tones of strong revulsion, holding the phone away from his ear and looking at it as if it had done him a great personal injury, “is doing something _stupid_.”

 

            “He is, sir?” Claire said, and quailed slightly when her boss turned an irritable look on her.

 

            “Of course he’s doing something stupid, Claire,” he drawled in long-suffering tones. “It’s a day ending in y, isn’t it? Inform Captain Becker that Quinn’s appearance at the latest anomaly will be delayed. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to hear it.”

             

            “Yes, sir,” Claire said, and made a hasty escape back to her own office. The spare desk had not yet been removed: she completely understood that spring-cleaning the ARC for bugs was a priority, but she really would have to light a fire under Norman, or sweet-talk Captain Becker into helping her shift it. In fact, Claire noticed as she sat down, the desk was completely untouched – exactly as Lorraine Wickes had left it, down to an unfinished cup of coffee that had been festering there for the past week at least. Claire grimaced and chucked it into the bin, and added the abandoned biro beside it to her own stock of stationery; the other woman would hardly miss it now. There was a fine layer of dust there, she observed as she moved the biro, nothing much, but enough to make it clear that the cleaners hadn’t dared to lay hands on the desk, or on the... well, that was frankly shocking, on the file that Miss Wickes had brazenly removed from the secure room and brought up here and just left behind, and Claire hadn’t even _noticed_ it.

 

            Appalled and berating herself inwardly, Claire picked the slim folder up, and read the name on the front. Not recognising it, she flipped it open and glanced at the mugshot held to the papers inside by a steel clip, and matched the face to a name. _Blade. So that’s his real name – Niall Richards. He doesn’t look much like a Niall._

 

            She flipped through it to check that nothing was missing, laid it down on her desk and put that call through to Captain Becker, stolidly filtering out his despairing swearwords. Then, without mentioning a word to anyone about the displaced file, she took it downstairs and locked it back up in the appropriate cabinet. Claire had not much liked Miss Wickes, quiet, unassuming and smooth and certain as steel, but enough time had passed since Claire had been made to feel like a placeholder for her that Claire was willing to give Miss Wickes the benefit of the doubt, and see the thing from her point of view. After all, it must be unnerving to find out that you were a place-holder for someone who had never lived, but had been loved anyway. And it must be even more unnerving, to be brought abruptly into contact with both that fact and the proof of it.

 

            Claire put the folder away, feeling almost sorry for the interloper, and went to try to persuade Norman into moving that sodding desk out of her office.

 

***

 

            One of the clones hovered. Helen suspected that one; it was one of the first she’d had made, and it was useful, yes, very useful, but it had... a mind of its own. It was devoted to her, of course, they all were, but there was no doubting that a clone that thought of her as something other than the woman that gave it orders could prove... problematic.

 

            Helen dismissed the concern, slipped the new shirt over her head and wrapped the new jacket around herself. After all, even if she had concerns about the clone’s loyalty, she need not worry about them – the hard part of her plan, the part that she had hesitated from so long, that still made her flinch to think about it, that was over.

 

            _Nick_ , she thought. _Nick_. He had been just as obstinate and blunt as he had been when she left, changing only superficially; the look in his eyes when she shot him had been just like that when she told him about her theories and later about Stephen. Even though she had altered the timeline twice Nick hadn’t changed. She could read that look. It meant _never_ : no going back, no changes, no apologies, nothing would ever make up for what she had done now.

 

            Nick would not take back that finality. So she had known that she had lost him, and she had done what she knew she had to, however much it haunted her.

 

            The clone shifted anxiously from foot to foot. She treated it to a smile.

 

            “The plan is ready, lady,” it said. “The anomaly is open.”

 

            “Yes,” Helen said, and smiled, and pressed the pendant, and Eve walked out of that derelict building and into the path of Christine Johnson’s men a happy woman.

 

            After all, a few hours, and none of this would have happened. None of it would ever have existed. It was the last change Helen Cutter – or Eve Smith – would ever make. She could rest, then, knowing she’d done everything she had to. Knowing she’d done everything she could. 

 

            Even Nick could agree with that.

 

***

 

            Lorraine Wickes was a well-trained young woman. She therefore did not start, boggle, or even look more than mildly surprised when she returned to her office with her coffee, and found the intercom buzzing horribly. She hit the button to accept the call at once. “Miss Johnson?” she asked, and endured a brief and tedious tirade before Miss Johnson acknowledged both that it was her and that she had something for Lorraine to do.

 

             “Of course, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said smoothly, thinking of the woman in the interrogation room with a certain amount of trepidation.

 

            “Coffee,” Miss Johnson said, relieving Lorraine’s mind no end. “Now. Black, two sugars. Bring it down to the tactics room.”

 

            “Of course, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said, ending the call and going back to the kitchen, her heart thudding painfully. The tactics room? So Christine was done with the woman in the interrogation room – or at least, it looked like it. What had happened to her? Lorraine resolved to check the infirmary after she had been down to the tactics room, and made the coffee in double-quick time, careful not to spill a drop as she made her way downstairs.

 

            Christine was busy, her eyes focussed laser-sharp on the wafer-thin touchscreens of the tactics room, pulling up schematic after schematic with long, sharp fingernails, Captain Wilder standing just behind her and to the right, listening to her sharp comments and from the absorbed look on his face trying to trace her train of thought. Silently, Lorraine wished him luck and quietly passed the cup to Christine, who took it with no more thanks than a sharp nod.

 

            “- _Damn_ it, she simply hasn’t given us enough information!” Christine said angrily, taking a hefty gulp of the scalding coffee and tapping her fingers furiously against the table-top. She shook her head, and took another gulp. Lorraine could see faint marks of tiredness on her face, and wondered at it quietly.

 

            “Is there anything I can do, Miss Johnson?” she enquired unwillingly.

 

            “What? No,” Christine snapped. “Wait- yes. Go and take the out of office off my email and get the technicians in to mend the photocopier.”

 

            “Yes, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said, grateful that the instructions had not included being a party to Christine’s undoubtedly unorthodox interrogation techniques, and made a hasty escape – although not back to her office, but to the infirmary.

 

            She went quietly in to the infirmary, which was smaller than it ought really to have been but did the job it was called upon to do, and knocked gently at Dr Sharma’s office door. It was thrust open by the doctor herself, wild-eyed, tight-lipped, and evidently in a fearful temper. Lorraine recoiled, narrowly escaping a broken nose as the door shot past her face.

 

            “What?” Dr. Sharma barked, and then calmed down abruptly as she saw who it was. “Oh, Lorraine. It’s you. Come in. Have you heard about our lady and mistress’s latest weird freak?”

 

            Lorraine winced and stepped inside the tiny office, which was crammed with medical journals, patient records and inventories. Somehow, a desk, chair and computer had made their way in there, and it was a constant source of astonishment to Lorraine that Dr Sharma managed to squeeze anything else in there, let alone herself.

 

            “ _Kidnapping_!” Dr Sharma bawled, in tones designed to be heard at both ends of the rowdiest NHS Accident and Emergency ward on a Friday night.

 

            Lorraine flinched. “Dipika, I’m right here.”

 

            Dr Sharma flung herself into her computer chair, and continued without lowering the volume one little bit. “If I’d known it would get me administering sodium pentathol at gunpoint, I’d never have told Christine _fucking_ Johnson I was bored!”

 

            “Yes, well,” Lorraine said, a little tartly, “we’ve all made that mistake, or we wouldn’t be here, yes? How are Sasha and Jaya? Is Jaya sleeping through the night yet?”

 

            Dr Sharma brightened, as Lorraine knew she would, at the mention of her daughter and her partner. “No, of course not. Little brat. Has Sasha and me up at all hours, but mostly Sasha. Lorraine, I married a _saint_.”

 

            Lorraine smiled. “I told you so.”

 

            Dr Sharma pointed an admonitory finger. “You ought to find someone. You could use a bit of non-platonic love.”

 

            Lorraine grimaced at her. “We have discussed my taste in men.”

 

            “So many nice guys,” Dr Sharma mourned. “All of them complete twats when it came down to it. Possibly you need a worse half.” She spun on her computer chair, and kicked her desk idly, hand clenching around the biro she was toying with. “Seriously, Lorraine. Captain fucking Wilder held a gun at my head while I pumped some wretch’s veins full of sodium pentathol, as if I hadn’t treated him for - arse. Patient confidentiality. But, for God’s sake- I’m honestly thinking of quitting.”

 

            “You, me and Professor Dickinson,” Lorraine sighed, leaning precariously against the desk. “Who’s also complaining of people holding guns to his head, by the way. Captain Wilder must be making a regular habit of it. Tell me what happened.”

 

            Dr Sharma shrugged. “I was in all night anyway, keeping an eye on Mister I Just Hate Shellfish in the corner there – no doubt you saw him fidgeting in the corner, he only feels a bit sick now – and writing a lengthy report for Chrissie-dear, who wouldn’t know what an anaphylactic reaction was if it jumped up and bit her on the-“

 

            “Bees,” Lorraine said, in a charitable mood.

 

            Dr Sharma stared at her. “What?”

 

            “She’s allergic to bees. Carry on.”

 

            “Hmm,” Dr Sharma said thoughtfully, and then brushed aside whatever alarming seed of a plot that had been. “Anyway. Lady Muck bowls in at half past stupid in the morning and demands that I assist in her violation of some poor sod’s basic human rights. I refuse. Didn’t know we had truth juice on the premises anyway! I certainly didn’t order it! Fifteen minutes later, down comes bloody Wilder and four of his monkeys to persuade me otherwise, so off I go with my little box of wonders, inject the pentathol, and I hope it does her no good whatever, the heartless, scheming bitch!”

 

            “I take it Sasha’s having no success with the swear box,” Lorraine observed.

 

            “No, and what’s worse is Jaya repeated some of it to the au pair the other day,” Dr Sharma grimaced. “Stop distracting me, Lorraine. Something’s got to be done.”

 

            “I know,” Lorraine said heavily. “But I don’t know how much I can do.”

 

            “You’re the only one with any influence over her.”

 

            “Influence?” Lorraine almost giggled. “No. Christine is her own woman, and the woman she is doesn’t take advice. But apart from that...” She sighed. “Christine... may not welcome my interference.”

 

            “Fuck it, Lorraine, there’s a life at stake! Don’t tell me she’ll ever free that woman!”

 

            “I won’t, because I very much doubt it!” Lorraine hissed. “Dipika, Christine’s captive is not the only one in more trouble than she can very well deal with!”

 

            There was a stunned silence: Lorraine stunned because she had spoken out loud what she hardly knew herself, and Dr. Sharma stunned because she had evidently never considered that Lorraine who toed the line so carefully could fall foul of anyone, even Christine.

 

            “I shouldn’t have said that,” Lorraine remarked in measured tones.

 

            Dr Sharma shook her head, and glanced at the family photograph perched on a bare millimetre of desk space, as if for reassurance. “Probably not.”

 

            “I can’t tell you more,” Lorraine persisted.

 

            “I’ve been doing this job long enough to learn there are things I shouldn’t want to know,” Dr Sharma said rather sadly, and brushed the frame with her fingertips.

 

            “One day,” Lorraine promised, and then both women jumped as a siren went off seemingly right in their ears. Dr Sharma swore luridly as the biro she had been holding snapped in her suddenly tense hand, spilling sticky red ink over her palm, and Lorraine dashed out of the office. “What?” she demanded of the world at large, and then ran upstairs to her own office and grabbed the gun in the bottom drawer, loaded it with hands that didn’t shake as much as they might have done, and ran back downstairs to the tactics room. It was almost empty, but Travis was sitting on the floor in the corner with a soldering iron and a confused expression, looking up and around for the source of the noise.

 

            “Travis!” Lorraine shouted. “Where did Christine go?”

 

            Travis shook his head and lifted his hands, looking puzzled. Lorraine cursed and darted back out of the room, heading for the interrogation room. It was surrounded by a roiling mass of men in grey combats, yelling and swearing, and Christine in the kind of temper that put Lorraine strongly in mind of History GCSEs and Queen Elizabeth I’s temper tantrums. She reached out and grabbed a corporal by the shoulder, hauling him out of the mass, and demanded to know what had happened.

 

            “Danny fucking Quinn!” the corporal bawled over the noise, adding a rather belated “Saving your presence, miss.”

 

            “Never mind about my bloody presence!” Lorraine snapped. “What did he do?”

 

            The corporal shrugged helplessly. “Knocked out Captain Wilder and took off with the prisoner.”

 

            “Knocked out-?” Lorraine repeated, gaping like a fish, and then got a grip. “Where is he now? Captain Wilder, not Quinn.”

 

            “On the floor?” the corporal suggested. “Terry put him in the recovery position and stayed with him. He should be waking up now, miss.”

 

“Go and get Dr Sharma,” Lorraine said, forbearing from comment on basic first aid and common sense and giving him a push in the right direction with the hand that didn’t have a gun in it. “Now.”

 

            “Yes, miss,” the corporal said, and went.

 

Lorraine made her way towards Christine, and stopped carefully a couple of metres away, waiting for the other woman to notice her. She did, and turned on her like a displeased honey badger, an icy glint in her eye.

 

“Lorraine. I want a search warrant for Lester’s warren and a warrant for that woman’s arrest as fast as you can.” Her eyes narrowed alarmingly, and Lorraine decided to be grateful that she hadn’t ordered a hit on Danny Quinn yet. “ _Faster_.”

 

            “Yes, Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said as calmly as she could, reminded herself that she didn’t know how to salute and furthermore shouldn’t do so with a loaded gun in her hand, and left, bypassing Dr. Sharma, who was rapidly turning the air blue with her curses, and headed back up to her office, where she unloaded the gun again, returned it and the ammunition to the bottom drawer and securely locked it. Then she sat at her desk and stared helplessly at the computer screen for a few minutes before sighing, throwing back a reckless gulp of rapidly cooling coffee, and composing an email to her contact at Scotland Yard.

           

***

 

            “Who’s that?” Pink said, eyeing the newcomer close by Danny Quinn with a certain amount of disfavour. She was young, dark-haired, dark-eyed and good-looking, but she looked businesslike, restless – nervous, almost – and all in all like a problem they would be stuck dealing with.

 

            “Search me,” Blade said, and frowned.

 

            “She looks freakishly familiar,” Pink said.

 

            Blade snorted. “What, one of your one-night-stands come back to bite you in the arse?”

 

            “Fuck off,” Pink said. “Don’t you think she’s familiar?” he demanded, glaring at Matt.

 

            Matt looked hard at the woman. “There’s something,” he conceded. “It’s the way she’s standing.”

 

            Pink gave Blade an I Told You So look.

 

            Blade shrugged. “She creeps me out, too, looking at us all like she has X-ray vision. But I don’t recognise her.”

 

            “Huh,” Pink said, and went back to changing a tyre on the jeep, which had picked up a ridiculously sharp tent-peg left lying around and had suffered not inconsiderably for it. “Give us a hand.”

 

            Blade took the mutilated tyre, rolled it away and brought the fresh one back before heaving the other into the boot.

 

            “That’s weird,” Matt complained. “You’ve got me thinking it too now.”

 

            “Probably nothing,” Blade said, but without certainty.

 

            “Hmm,” Matt said.

 

            “What?” Pink asked, twisting the security nut on and winding the jack down. 

 

            “Lyle’s scratching his thumbs,” Matt muttered, staring hard at the strange woman. “He’s standing there, looking at her... and he’s scratching his thumbs.”

 

            The three men shared a look, and then Pink ducked his head, spat on his palms and rubbed them together, trying to get the worst of the black grease off his hands. “I don’t know,” he grumbled softly, accent coming out almost shrilly. “Timeline changes, that Christine Johnson stabbing Lester in the back, all that artefact bollocks, random women. What next?”

 

            “I don’t want to find out,” Matt told him, and went off, presumably to have a word with Captain Becker, for all the good it would do him.

 

            Blade glanced at the woman again, and his eyes narrowed. He wasn’t as certain as Pink, who had a remarkable knack of catching tiny details in among the semi-permanent grumpiness and intransigence, but there was something...

 

            The woman turned and looked back at him suddenly, with a half-remembered look, simultaneously challenging and skittish.

 

            Neither she nor Blade blinked.


	10. Chapter 10

            “Miss Johnson,” Lorraine said, and laid a search warrant, an arrest warrant, and a copy of a public information poster about ‘Eve Smith’ – presuming that was her real name – on the desk in front of Christine. Lorraine felt slightly guilty about the poster, which accused Eve Smith of aiding and abetting terrorism, but Christine had all but dictated the details to her and had provided the photograph and vital statistics on the poster, whether they were false or not.

 

            Miss Johnson turned on her with blue eyes like ice, the pupils shrunk to tiny pin-pricks, and Lorraine fought not to recoil. It was an immense relief when Christine took those eyes off her, and stared at the paperwork instead. She inhaled sharply and flicked through them. “Excellent. Go and get your gun. You’re coming with me.”

 

            “Where to, Miss Johnson?” Lorraine asked, dreading the answer.

 

            Christine Johnson shot her a look of pure distaste. “Lester’s outfit.”

 

            “I presume Captain Wilder will be joining us?” Lorraine tried. “Would you like me to alert him?”

 

            “I’ll do it myself. Follow your orders,” Christine snapped.

 

            Lorraine left hurriedly, heading for her office and slipping on the shoulder holster before making determinedly for the car-park, where she fell into step with Captain Wilder. “Do you know what’s happening?” she asked without preamble.

 

            He looked down at her, his face stone. “Recapture of Eve Smith,” he said, and Lorraine felt her eyebrows fly up. Captain Wilder grunted, and turned away.

 

            By the time Christine arrived, the convoy was ready to go and Lorraine was struggling not to fidget. “Lester will be furious,” she observed softly.

 

            Captain Wilder grunted again. “Not looking forward to looking Hilary Becker in the face again.”

 

            “Is it difficult?” Lorraine asked, turning to him. “Going against someone you taught?”

 

            He looked at her flatly. “No. I’m a soldier, I follow orders. So does Becker.” He shifted in his seat, and switched the engine on; its low rumble filled the car. “Heads-up.”

 

            Lorraine sighed, spotted Christine marching out of the door into the car park, and cranked her seat forward until her knees pressed against the glovebox. “Here we go. Will they try to kill us?”

 

            Captain Wilder shifted the car into first gear. “No,” he said gruffly. “But they’ll want to.”

 

            The car door opened, and Christine slammed in. “Go,” she ordered, and they moved off.

 

 

            They made it into the ARC without meeting any resistance, although there was a brief wait at the gates, and Lorraine counted it as a definite plus that they didn’t have to charge the tiger trap again. Security had been increased, she noticed, and wondered suddenly what her role was here. She took a breath.

 

            “Miss Johnson?”

 

            “Yes, Lorraine?” Christine snapped, staring, hawk-like, out of the window.

 

            “Do you have any specific instructions for me?”

 

            Christine smiled thinly, and held some kind of memory stick out to Lorraine. “Take this to Lester’s office, plug it into his computer and leave.”

 

            Lorraine took it, and stared at it, turning it over and over in her fingers for a few minutes, noting the small grey button on one side. What was it? A virus or some kind of bug? She slipped the ribbon printed with HOME OFFICE around her head, and then for good measure tucked the small red and silver object down the front of her blouse. Better not to make it obvious that she was carrying it if it did turn out to destroy the ARC’s entire infrastructure; hopefully, fewer people would remember that she had had it.

 

            She followed Christine out of the car and into the ARC, half a pace behind Captain Wilder and intensely grateful that she was wearing a nondescript coffee-brown dress that stopped her standing out. She dropped further back as Christine confronted Lester and Quinn, waiting, tense and scared, for everyone to leave the office. She wasn’t a natural field agent, never had been; she was much better at staying unnoticed and organising things precisely than immersing herself in a lie, and this was making her chest tighten with anxiety. The memory stick was cool against her skin, the ribbon rasping at the back of her neck.

 

            Finally they went down into the drum and Christine honed in on Eve Smith – Lorraine recognised her from Travis’ vague description – but Lorraine didn’t wait to see what happened. She slipped inside the office as the others moved away. The computer’s tower was in a metal box under the desk; she fumbled with the ribbon, pulling out the memory stick, and then-

 

            “Helen.” The voice carried clearly from the drum, and Lorraine gasped, almost fell backwards off her heels, and hurriedly straightened, reaching for her gun. There could be only one Helen in this context, and she flicked off the safety catch, holding her finger straight outside the trigger guard, hands instinctively falling into the right positions, as she slipped out of the room. This woman had shot her husband point-blank. There was no knowing what she would do next, and Lorraine was suddenly terrified that she would have to shoot to kill. With this gun, she suspected she would not miss.

 

            She took several quiet steps to the side, looking for the right angle. A different woman, drawn and desperate-looking, had replaced Eve Smith – who seemed to have disappeared entirely. She was holding a gun on Christine, and completely ignoring the gun Captain Wilder trained on her. By the faintly panicked look on his face, Lorraine could see that this was the last thing he had expected.

 

             Between one breath and the next, as Lorraine lined up her shot and took a breath, hands reached out and grabbed her, one hand covering her mouth tightly as she tried to scream, the other wrapped tightly around her wrist, forcing the P228 up towards the ceiling. She was dragged backwards into the corridor next to Lester’s office, which had solid walls.

 

            “If I take my hands away,” a familiar voice murmured in her ear, “will you scream or shoot me?”

 

            She shook her head furiously and Blade let go of her. She flicked the safety catch back on and turned to him, berating him in a whisper. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

 

            He gave her an oblique look. “Getting you out of Helen’s line of fire. Stay back and keep quiet.” He pushed her against the corridor wall, putting himself between her and the action in the drum. Lorraine strained to see and hear what was going on and bit the inside of her cheek to cover a gasp when she saw Helen escort Christine out of the ARC, a gun pressed under her jaw, and Captain Wilder tell the rest of Christine’s soldiers to take orders from Miss Wickes before running after her.

 

            “ _What_?” Lorraine said in a strangled gasp, feeling as if she was running to keep up with events and staring after Captain Wilder. She knew Christine had him on a string, but she hadn’t anticipated a wild solo rescue – unless he was planning to take those soldiers who had stayed behind with the vehicles? And how did he expect her to deal with _this_?

 

            “You’ll be fine,” Blade assured her, and she fought the impulse to believe him - logically, she knew Captain Wilder had just handed her a terrifying challenge. How on earth was she going to get them out of here, and would she even be able to control them to do it? She wouldn’t be surprised if Lester had the lot of them arrested. She almost wouldn’t blame him.

 

            He chuckled, one side of his lips quirking upwards. “Stop giving me that look.”

 

            Lorraine realised that she’d been giving him the kind of glare she usually reserved for her younger brothers and hastily rearranged her face.

 

            “What’s that?” Blade demanded suddenly, and reached out and picked up the memory stick. It was lying outside her blouse, where she hadn’t had time to tug it over her head but hadn’t left it inside her shirt either.

 

            “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Christine gave it to me.” She slipped the ribbon over her head, leaving it in his hand; it looked small there, too tiny to be harmful. “You’d better give it to the technicians and see what they make of it. Christine... has been keeping me out of her plans. This one, I have no idea of.”

 

            Blade looked at her, and then nodded and tucked it into one of his many pockets. Lorraine took a couple of steps forward and looked down into the drum, where a stand-off was developing, and she shut her eyes despairingly. It was one thing to break the madness of a moment to stop Lieutenant Dawson killing an innocent man, but quite another to take control of what amounted to a small private army in enemy territory and stop them all killing each other, and she wasn’t sure she could do it.

 

            A hand landed on her shoulder, warm and obscurely comforting, and did not move when she started in shock. “You’ll be fine,” Blade repeated, and let his hand fall away.

 

            Lorraine gulped, nodded, and stepped forwards, resting her hands on the metal banister. “Stop!” she shouted, seeing Lieutenant Dawson going for a gun and nose-to-nose with one of Lester’s soldiers, and successfully distracting everyone. “Enough,” she said, a little more softly. “Lieutenant Dawson, _put that gun down now_.”

 

            Lester folded his arms and sniffed. “Miss Wickes. Fancy seeing you here.”

 

            Lorraine resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. “Believe me, sir, it’s as much of a thrill for me as it is for you.”

           

            “Lorraine Wickes?” one of the scientists piped up. Lorraine recognised her as Sarah Page; she was looking fascinated, and holding a notebook – she kept glancing from Lorraine to a page of it. She was also staring at Lorraine as if she was a particularly interesting experimental subject, which Lorraine did not appreciate under the circumstances.

 

            “Yes?” she said brusquely. “Can it wait?”

 

             “Oh, yeah, not a problem,” Sarah Page said blithely. “Have a word when you’ve got a minute, will you?”

 

            Lorraine felt her head tilting to one side and her eyes bugging out in astonishment without any apparent intervention from her higher brain function.

 

            “Not a good time?” Sarah Page guessed. “Never mind. I need to think this through a bit myself.” She smiled at Lorraine, and sat down with the notebook and started poking a computer.

 

            In the stunned silence, Lorraine got herself down into the drum in something like a dream, and began to negotiate with Lester, compromising over bringing all Christine’s soldiers into the drum and holding them under guard but not putting them into the cells until it was known what had happened to Christine and agreeing that none of them would suffer adverse consequences for what had happened today. Lester seemed ready enough to recognise that none of them had had any choice in what they had done, and was suspiciously ready for forgive Lorraine herself; she had trouble understanding why. Eventually, he invited her up into his office for coffee brought by Claire, who now looked slightly less afraid of her and even returned the smile Lorraine tried. Then after a few moments of desultory small-talk Lester’s phone rang, and he took the call. Lorraine found herself standing and staring out of his office window, remembering the last time she had been here.

 

            She was startled into almost spilling her coffee by a tap on her shoulder, and she turned quickly to find herself face-to-face with Dr. Sarah Page. She was tall, with long, straight black hair, shrewd black eyes, and the stern face of a medieval saint livened by frequent smiling and intellectual curiosity; the official snapshot in the file Lorraine had looked up weeks ago didn’t do her justice.

 

Sarah held out a hand and smiled. “Dr Page,” she said, with easy charm. “You can call me Sarah.”

 

            “Pleased to meet you, Sarah,” Lorraine said, shaking again. “I’m Miss Wickes. You can call me Lorraine, if you like.”

 

            “Lorraine,” Sarah said at once, and smiled again, this time a little nervously. “Um. This is going to be a difficult conversation to have.”

 

            Lorraine raised an eyebrow. “Really? Would you like me to start it? I imagine it’s about the change in timelines, so we have some common ground there.”

 

            Sarah goggled. “How do you know ab-“

 

            “Do you actually want me to answer that question?” Lorraine asked, having found that it was a very effective way of getting people not to demand answers she didn’t want to give.

 

            “Er. Okay. No.” Sarah stared at her wide-eyed for a moment, and then shook her head and got on with it. “Well, I take it you know that there used to be another version of you that worked here. A couple of months ago now, three of our soldiers came through an anomaly swearing up and down they knew you, when in actual fact they couldn’t have done.”

 

            “Yes,” Lorraine confirmed, setting her coffee down, her attention fixed on Sarah. She wondered who the other two soldiers had been.

 

            Sarah paused, and looked down at the notebook in her hands, and then looked up at Lorraine again. “It was deliberate. The switch. Someone did it on purpose.”

 

            “Who?” Lorraine demanded quickly.

 

            “Helen,” Sarah said plainly.  


            Lorraine felt as if she’d been plunged into freezing cold water. Breath stolen, she fought for words to say and took refuge in familiar, rule-bound formality. “Dr. Page, I presume you got your information out of that notebook, and that it was Helen’s? What else does it say?”

 

            Sarah picked the book up again and flipped it open. The pages were stiff with pictures and drawings, as well as neatly-written notes crammed into every available space, and some pages on which the number ‘333’ was written over and over again. She flicked through to a section marked by dog-eared pages and turned the notebook round, showing it to Lorraine. She had not meant to offer it to the other woman, but Lorraine took it carefully and examined it, noting the fact that the writing made little sense. It was written in English, but appeared to be mad ramblings, inconsequential and unrelated, even though the number of arrows pointing to some pictures, heavily underlined words and repeated phrases suggested that there was more to the writing than was immediately obvious.

 

            This section was full of photographs and scraps of newspaper. There were three of a man Lorraine recognised as Professor Cutter, although he had different haircuts and dressed slightly differently in each photograph – and yet none of them could have been more than about a couple of years apart in total. There were two of Jennifer Lewis, one heavily made-up with an elaborate hairdo and another more relaxed and natural, and one of a woman almost identical to Jennifer, but not quite. Each photograph was labelled, and the one of Jennifer’s doppelganger had been ringed several times. In insistent capitals that had marked the paper so deeply it was almost torn, a name above it read CLAUDIA BROWN. There were newspaper segments accompanying this page, tightly folded flimsy paper from as far back as 1998 chronicling the disappearance of Helen Cutter. So far, so much that was recognisable. Lorraine knew the story of Nick and Helen Cutter, and was familiar with the existence of Jennifer Lewis, although Claudia Brown was a complete mystery.

 

            She flicked the page over, and took a deep and startled breath. The words ‘Test Subject’ headed the double page, not encrypted like the rest of the book, although the page itself descended into the same gobbledegook that had masked the meaning of the segment about Nick Cutter. And beneath those words was a picture of Lorraine Wickes circa 1999, wearing a Trinity College t-shirt, and a rather more grainy and indistinct picture of Lorraine Wickes, slightly different but immediately recognisable, nearly ten years later, crossing the road.

 

            She felt suddenly light-headed and realised that she was breathing too quickly, sharp, panicked breaths, and that Sarah was staring at her anxiously. She tried to moderate herself and moved onto the next double page, ignoring the dense writing she couldn’t understand and focusing on the pictures and news cuttings. There were only a few here; Helen appeared to have done some complicated planning and focussed on Lorraine at all stages of her life, looking for a simple but definite change to make. Then she turned a few more pages and came across one that was almost empty, save for two newspaper adverts out of the _Times_ and the single word _eureka_.

 

            “Why,” Lorraine heard herself say, her voice frozen with anger, brittle as a glacier.

 

            “Like she says,” Sarah said, grim-faced. “She wanted a test subject.” She swallowed, and looked Lorraine dead in the eye. “She changed the world by accident once. She turned Claudia Brown into Jenny Lewis simply by sleeping with the wrong fiancé, apparently. Then she thought that she’d connected the Apocalypse Future- sorry, you wouldn’t know –“

 

            “If you mean the one where the air is hazy, the buildings and cars are abandoned, and future predators infest the place, I know exactly what you mean,” Lorraine said impatiently. “Christine has a pet anomaly that goes there and every now and then it bursts out and kills the photocopier down the hall and I have to get in the repairmen. It’s a nuisance and I’m not interested in it. Keep going.”

 

            “It does what?” Sarah demanded, sidetracked.

 

            “ _Dr Page_. Finish this scientific oddity, and _then_ you can move onto the next one.”

 

“Right,” Sarah said unwillingly, giving Lorraine an odd look and making a couple of notes in her own notepad. “Bursts... out... Right. Okay. Well, she thought she’d connected this future to something Nick had done, her ex-husband, and she wanted to know if it was possible to knock him off course before he wiped out the human race. Or something like that. She’s completely nuts-“

 

“You have to be to blow up government premises. It’s something of a prerequisite. Please get to the _point_.”

 

“I’m getting there. So she’d changed the world by accident and now she wanted to know if she could do it on purpose. She chose a test subject more or less at random, researched their life and found a turning point. And then she... well. She turned. And she changed their life. Your life.”

 

“And knowing that she could change the course of a life,” Lorraine said through numb lips, “she tried to find a way to stop Nick Cutter. And when she couldn’t find a peaceful one...”

 

“...she shot him,” Sarah finished for her, nodding. She cleared her throat and looked down at the notebook. “But about this anomaly-“

 

“I should have killed her when I had a shot,” Lorraine said harshly.

 

Sarah raised an eyebrow. “Do you think that would bring back the other you?”

 

“No,” Lorraine said tightly. “But it would be a measure of revenge. It’s not even myself I’m angry for, but- she wrecked two lives just because she wanted to prove a _theory_.”

 

Sarah nodded in acknowledgement. “But about this anomaly you mentioned - we’ve been doing some work on a similar phenomenon. Well, I say we, I’m not a physicist, just interested - and this is Connor Temple’s observation anyway. He gets little enough credit for his work. We find that once there’s been one anomaly in a place, the chance that there will be another anomaly in the same place rockets. The bigger and stronger the anomaly, the more likely a recurrence is, and the daughter anomalies will usually be within about a hundred years or so of the parent anomaly.”

 

            Lorraine stared at her, lost for words, and remembered what Travis had said in the kitchen. _It was getting to the point where we’d never seen such a strong anomaly, ever, and we wanted to see what it was going to do..._ “The anomaly burst out of its shields this morning - the technician didn’t have time to route auxiliary power to them. He said it was one of the strongest anomalies they’d seen.”

 

            “Oh God,” Sarah said. “And has it happened before?”

 

            “Yes,” Lorraine said. She felt distinctly sick. “It’s not safe to go back there, is it?”

 

            Slowly, Sarah shook her head. Lorraine bit her tongue. What, was she going to have to send everyone home now, like schoolchildren after a fire alarm? It looked like it, but she didn’t fancy her chances.

 

            “Miss Wickes,” Lester said abruptly, and she glanced across at him. He was holding his phone, and looking even grimmer than Sarah. “Captain Becker took a team and followed Miss Johnson, Mrs Cutter and Captain Wilder. Mrs Cutter threw Miss Johnson into an anomaly, Captain Becker doesn’t seem to think she survived. The entire building is swarming with something Becker describes as ‘prehistoric carnivorous dragonflies’, which Becker thinks killed Captain Wilder and probably everyone left in the building – Captain Becker had to retreat and call in reinforcements, which means your men need to be removed from the ARC at once. The men to guard them can’t be spared.”

 

            Lorraine felt the blood rush to her head and her heart pound in her ears. Christine, killed by an anomaly? It seemed impossible, and Lorraine wasn’t sure whether to believe that Captain Wilder could have been killed by an overgrown insect - surely it couldn’t have happened, surely he was just somewhere inside, waiting and watching for his opportunity to break out to safety. It was the others she worried for - Dipika Sharma had gone home early for her daughter’s Parents’ Evening, but what about Travis or Professor Dickinson? She was suddenly furiously angry with Christine Johnson; the sheer, unimaginable waste of human life didn’t bear thinking of. She hoped like hell that the drills and protocols hammered into everyone’s heads had held; Christine had at least been very security-conscious, and it was possible that the alarms had been set off when the anomalies had begun to appear and at least someone had escaped. Possible – just not very likely.

 

            “I see,” she said softly, for lack of anything else to say.

 

            “I’m sorry for your loss,” Lester drawled.

 

            Lorraine gave him the evil eye. “Thank you for your... condolences.”

 

            Lester inclined his head, and then glanced significantly out towards the drum, as if to say in the same breath _it’s the least I can do_ and _back to business_. Lorraine tried very hard not to hate him.


	11. Chapter 11

            She nodded back, and then went out onto the balcony and walked slowly down the ramp, hearing the click of her shoes on the hard floor as she reached ground level and made for the group of Christine’s- of _her_ men. They were bunched together, some sitting, some standing, against one of the walls, surrounded by a semicircle of armed ARC soldiers; they appeared to be mostly in a reasonable temper, although Lieutenant Dawson was prowling up and down the inner edge of the semicircle, just far enough away that they couldn’t justifiably shoot him.

 

            Lorraine approached the group and looked at the two nearest of Lester’s men until they got out of her way. Her men had gone quiet, looking at her; she swept her eyes over them, looking for new visible bruises or especially angry faces, any evidence that Lester’s men had knocked them about. When she had assured herself that there probably hadn’t been enough trouble that she’d have to act, she took a deep breath and spoke.

 

            “Miss Johnson is dead,” she said, and fought hard not to grin when someone stage-whispered ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead!’ It wasn’t right; the woman was dead, after all, and she had been an efficient and gifted politician as well as an evil boss. “Sergeant, take that man’s name. It is also my... rather sadder... duty to inform you that Captain Wilder is missing, and also believed to be dead.”

 

            That sparked an outburst of muttering. Lorraine gave them a few moments, and then said in the most authoritative tones she could manage: “I’m not done.” She waited for them to fall silent, and nodded sharply when they did. “Unfortunately, the headquarters is currently unusable, and by unusable, I mean overrun by what Captain Becker chooses to describe as prehistoric carnivorous dragonflies. _Silence_!... Miss Johnson put us all in unspeakable danger by instigating certain experiments, and various chickens have come home to roost, including a lack of respect for the safety protocols surrounding the Physics department.” She took a deep breath, and clapped her hands together. “So, this is what we do. We will withdraw from the Anomaly Research Centre in good order and then we will all go home. Until further notice, the project formerly run by Christine Johnson is suspended, and I expect, given today’s events, that it will be disbanded. I will be liaising with the Minister unless I can find someone more senior who isn’t dead, and you will be informed of new postings as and when they come up. There will be no reprisals for today’s fiasco. The blame lies with a dead woman. It will be buried with her.”

 

            “What, we’re running away?” Lieutenant Dawson demanded, a jeering tone in his voice.

 

            “Don’t start something you can’t finish, Lieutenant Dawson,” Lorraine recommended, meeting his eyes. “This is over.”

 

            “Since when can you give me orders?”

 

            “Since Captain Wilder left me in charge,” Lorraine said, doing her level best to keep calm while being confronted by a man she was certain was quite mad.   

           

            “You’re a civilian, and I’m the highest ranking officer here. We’ll return to headquarters stat,” he said, addressing the other soldiers from Christine’s project, “we’ve got work to do.”

 

            Lorraine shut her eyes, took a deep breath, counted to ten, and lost her temper anyway. She’d had enough of bloody Dawson and his two and a half brain cells. “If you want to be eaten by killer dragonflies, that’s your business,” she snapped. “We’ll drop you off five minutes’ walk from headquarters, and you can go and be someone else’s problem, Lieutenant Dawson, because if you’re mine for very much longer I may very well shoot you! But I won’t let you get anyone else killed. Shut up and sit down. Sergeant Yates, I want Lieutenant Dawson under close arrest, he’s a danger to himself and everyo-“

 

            Faster than Lorraine’s eyes could catch, Lieutenant Dawson brought up a pistol and pointed it at her, and Sergeant Yates, who had been about to take custody of the miscreant with three of the more senior NCOs flanking him, froze. Lorraine went very still, eyes fixed on the black barrel, and the pulse in the base of her throat hammered; she had been simultaneously thrumming with rage and panic, and now fear got into the workings of her brain, choking and paralysing. At least thirty guns were now trained on Lieutenant Dawson, but if he pulled the trigger before they did, her brains would be so much blood-soaked, bone-splintered pulp anyway. She fought to find words.

 

            “Will you kill me, then, Lieutenant? And start a bloodbath? Neither of us will walk out of that alive.”

 

            “Wrong, Miss Wickes,” Blade said, and she felt a sharp jolt and inexplicable relief; she hadn’t realised he was so close, hadn’t realised he was there at all, and felt immeasurably better to have him close by. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a glint of steel and reflected dizzily that sometimes it was handy to have a gifted killer around. “You will. He won’t.”

 

            Lorraine raised her eyebrows. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment, Corporal Richards, but this will be settled without bloodshed. I think we all know that the late, lamented Miss Johnson left a pyramid of bodies behind her, and I have no intention of allowing it to grow any further. Let’s try not to make this more of a monumental fiasco than it already is. Lieutenant Dawson, you will put down your weapons. Sergeant Yates, you will search him, and then choose a team to help you escort Lieutenant Dawson to a cell. If that’s allowable, Mr Lester?”

 

            Lester gave a courtly nod of the head from where he stood on the balcony before his office, leaning on the banister and well out of the way of any guns – and also in prime position to watch her Mexican stand-off. “That is acceptable.”

 

            “Thank you,” Lorraine said, and tearing her eyes from the threat of the gun half-turned to smile at him.

 

            Then, a lot of things happened very fast.

 

            “ _Fucking bitch_ ,” Lieutenant Dawson seethed, apparently reaching boiling point, and Lorraine hit the floor and lost all the breath in her body as the ARC soldier next to her tackled her to the ground, and then there was a spray of blood and Dawson fell bonelessly to the floor, a limp rag with blood pouring from its torn throat. Lorraine shook the soldier off, and climbed to her feet, ashen and gasping for breath, gulping in huge breaths of air.

 

            “That settles it,” she said when she could find oxygen to speak, her voice thin and strained, and then she stopped and breathed again and said more strongly. “I want everyone out in under five minutes, and if they aren’t, heads will roll. I hope I make myself totally clear.”

 

            “Yes, ma’am,” Sergeant Yates said, and saluted.

 

            Lorraine’s mouth twisted into a smile. It felt grotesque on her face. “Thank you, sergeant. Carry on.”

 

            She stood looking down at Dawson’s body, silent and still, while the sergeant got the men out of the ARC. When the room was almost empty, she looked up at the man standing over the body. His hands were by his sides, red blood congealing on them, and his eyes were steady. They held something Lorraine could now read easily and that she wasn’t sure if she was ready to face.

 

            Lester interrupted the moment. “Miss Wickes. What are your plans for the future?”

 

            Lorraine turned her head sharply, as though jerked out of a trance. “My plans?” she repeated. “Well. I’ll need to tie up Christine’s loose ends first, and square things with the Minister. That won’t be difficult; she was so far out of favour she might as well have been on Pluto. He’ll probably be glad to hear she’s dead. Then, I’m going to take a holiday. I haven’t had a holiday for a long time. And then, I’m going to get a new job.”

 

            Lester raised his eyebrows. “You shock me. Can I persuade you to join our merry band of misfits? I seem to be... temporarily short of staff. A new operations manager is the very least I need.”

 

            Lorraine smiled. “Not a chance. I’ve had enough of anomalies for the moment. But I’ll happily make a few recommendations.”

 

            “Where will you go, then?”

 

            “Oh...” Lorraine looked down at her feet, and then back up at him. “I haven’t decided yet. I’ve thought of a secondment to the Foreign Office - a new country, a change of scene. But I think I’d prefer UNIT.” She held her head high. “As a matter of fact, I have an email in my inbox from them, waiting to be answered. I’m in a strong position, particularly if I can neaten this up to everyone’s satisfaction, and I think I can.”

 

            “I’m pleased to hear it.” Lester rubbed his hands together. “Let me know if you change your mind. In the meantime, Miss Wickes, I think you gave yourself an order. The inimitable Sergeant Yates is waiting outside for you, but I’m sure Corporal Richards will be happy to escort you out of the building and take you home. _After_ washing his hands.”

 

            Lorraine pretended that her heart didn’t jump, just a little.

 

 

            She waited until Blade had cleaned off his hands, and let him walk her out of the building, onto the decorative, overgrown grass lawn. “Thank you,” she said. “For killing Dawson.”

 

            He looked down at her, green eyes painfully readable again. “You don’t need to thank me.”

 

            “No,” she agreed. “I just want to.” She stopped, and turned to him, and he stopped with her. “Did you know that Captain Ross thought you would kill me?”

 

            “He was wrong,” Blade said, unemotionally.

 

            “Yes,” she said. “He was.” She wrapped her jacket more tightly around herself. “I know that Mr Lester told you to take me home. You don’t have to.”

 

            She could feel him trying to catch her eye, trying to read her face, and looked up at him. They were standing very close together. “What if I want to?” he said, at last.

 

            Lorraine smiled a little. “Then I would have to say that I would prefer you not to. Not right now.”

 

            His eyes fell, and she laid a comforting hand on his upper arm, touching warm skin chilled by the outdoors cold and the thin cotton of his t-shirt. “I need time to think,” she told him. “Time to sort things out in my own head. Don’t worry, Niall, I’ll be back. You don’t get rid of me so easily, as I think you ought to know by now.”

 

            He met her eyes, and a corner of his mouth crinkled into a smile. “I know.”

 

            Lorraine let her hand slide from his arm. “I’ll call you,” she promised. “And in the meantime...”

 

            She let the sentence fall, and he raised his eyebrows. “In the meantime?”

 

            Lorraine stood on her tiptoes and kissed him full on the mouth, enjoying the electricity the contact sent through her so much that she lingered rather longer than she meant to; his hands hovered around her, and then settled lightly on her waist, drawing her close against him. It felt easy, simple, as if this was exactly the right thing to be doing, exactly the right place for her to be, and that was so comforting after the scares and stresses of the past weeks that she never wanted to let go.

 

Because she was Lorraine Wickes, and was painfully aware that this was a terrible way to start any relationship she actually wanted to last, she let go anyway, gently breaking away from him. He let her go the moment he felt her moving away, and she smiled at him, feeling breathless, light-headed, and completely safe for the first time in months. “On account,” she promised, and told herself that she would come back to him if it was the last thing she did.

 

            He smiled back at her. “One day, I’ll return it.”

 

            Her smile grew in response, and she dared a teasing answer. “By that time, it’ll have accumulated a lot of interest.”

 

            “I look forward to it,” Blade grinned, eyes glinting with a promise of his own.

 

            Her head tilted to one side, and she let her smile soften. “Me too,” she said, and turned on her heel and walked away, almost exactly as she had done at Antonia’s. Except that this time, when she reached the gates, she looked back – and he was still there, hands tucked into his pockets and half-smiling.

 

            She’d be back.  

 

 

***

 

 

**CODA**

_three years later_

 

            “This is the BBC News. It’s seven o’clock. The date is Saturday the fifteenth of March, 2011. A forty-three-year-old woman has been arrested and charged with murder and the bombing of a government facility after a three-year manhunt. The woman, Helen Cutter, has been on the run for thirteen years after going missing in the Forest of Dean in 1998-“

 

            “Fucking radio,” Blade muttered, jerked awake by the alarm clock’s turning to the BBC news report, and reached out and hit it. Unsurprisingly, it turned off.

 

            “What was that?” Lorraine demanded with surprising coherence for one still half asleep, and yawned.

 

            “Nothing important,” Blade said, and slid back under the duvet again, wrapping an arm around her waist and kissing the back of her neck, making her arch her back like a cat in the sunshine. “Go back to sleep.”

 

 


End file.
